May 17, 2023 • 59 mins
In 1978, a young pilot named Frederick Valentich disappeared somewhere off the coast of Australia. His last recorded message to authorities -- "it's not an aircraft" -- prompted decades of speculation from UFOlogists, skeptics, and law enforcement alike. As we record tonight, his body has yet to be found.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Our colleague Nol is not here but will be returning shortly.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer, all mission control decand most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 4 (00:38):
You are here and.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to
know now. Longtime listeners, fellow conspiracy realist, over the years,
you may have clocked something that has occurred to Matt
and I as well. It seems as if every single
country across the planet has a few UFO or UAP stories.
(01:03):
In tonight's episode, we're heading over to the Southern Hemisphere. Hello,
fellow conspiracy realists from Australia and all points south. Australia
is home to some of the most unique animals and
biomes on the planet. I mean, Matt, I believe it's
true that for both of us we've never been to
(01:26):
Australia physically, but we want to go. Is that correct?
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Ready? When you are Australia. Just send us a plane,
preferably a larger one than the one we're going to
be talking about today, and we'll get on it and
we'll fly to you.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
We'll need a little more than the range of Assessna
for that one, or maybe just a lot of layovers.
Get pretty creative with where our crossings are. So Australia
is it turns out, also a hotbed of alleged UFO
activity and all all sorts of conspiratorial lore. It's home
to pine and gap. I think most famously that would
(02:05):
be the that would be the prominent conspiratorial subject on
the continent. But tonight's question is about a specific person,
a young man, a budding pilot named Frederick Valentiche. What
happened to him? Here are the facts. This kid was
(02:26):
going places. He was born on June ninth, nineteen fifty eight,
and for a lot of his life he was one
of those people who always knew what they wanted to do.
He had a dream, you know, and that's relatively noble
and rare, I would say a lot of people growing
(02:48):
up drift, you know. We try on different versions of
ourselves until we find the one that.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Fits absolutely and often when you hear about truly remarkable
people who who have put their stamp on the world
in some way, they share this thing that Frederick has,
where they're just driven by some unknown force from an
early age on a mission really to accomplish something.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Yeah, at some point early in his life, young fred
looked up at the sky and it stayed with him.
He had a lifelong interest in all things aviation, all
aerial phenomena, and his father described him as a quote
UFO fanatic from an early age, and he said, you know,
(03:36):
my son was always watching movies about extraterrestrials. He would
keep an eye out for anything in the news about
a possible UFO. And keep in mind, of course, this
is before the age of the public internet. So this
kid was making scrapbooks. He was taking scissors and clipping
(03:58):
out newspaper report so sidings and collecting them for himself.
He joined theaf the Royal Australian Air Force Training Corps,
think of it sort of like an ROTC equivalent, And
originally he wanted to be a military pilot, and he
(04:18):
tried to enlist twice. He was rejected each time. Apparently,
as far as we can tell, because of his lack
of educational qualifications. That's another way of saying he failed
a couple of components of these exams multiple times, but
he didn't give up. He decided he would qualify for
(04:41):
a pilot license on his own, because, as we know,
you don't have to be in the military to pilot
and aircraft in Australia or in the US. You can
totally get a different kind of license, right, different kinds
of qualifications.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Yeah, maybe it's something everybody knows, but I didn't realize
for a long time that getting a pilot's license doesn't
mean you need to own an aircraft or right have
your own aircraft. I didn't understand that you could rent
out an aircraft in the same way that you could,
let's say, rent a boat. If your family ever went
on a vacation one time to a lake, and you
(05:21):
can rent a boat out. But you know, in the boat,
you don't even really need a license, a specific license
for that. For an aircraft, it's a little more particular
because it is a very different type of machine you're
piloting there. But I guess I just in my head,
getting a pilot's license is the equivalent of just getting
(05:41):
a driver's license being able to control a certain type
of craft.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
Yeah, yeah, well said, it's also pretty expensive in terms
of time and in terms of money. We of course,
we have friends, I think mutual and then just ends
outside of the show who have followed in Frederick's footsteps.
They went and got their own pilot licenses. You can
(06:08):
get one to just be a private pilot. You don't
have to own a plane, like you said, Matt, you know,
I mean that might sound weird for some of us,
but the perhaps the most readily available comparison is the
driver's license. You don't have to own a car to
have a driver's license, but if you are ever driving
(06:30):
a car and someone asked whether you can drive that
car legally, you gotta have your little card, you know
what I mean.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
I think personally, just for me, it was such an
unattainable thing. Like a pilot's license is something that a
pilot is or a future pilot is going to do.
Somebody who's going to fly for an airline, or like
Frederick is going to be a pilot for the military.
In some regard, you don't just get a pilot's license.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
I think we should seriously consider at least one of
us having one, just to be prepared. Okay, let's yeah,
because we've got a local We've got a local airfield
here a little bit closer to your side of town
that will rent out planes and we'll provide instruction.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Oh dude, they're peppered all around this place.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
They're just going to tax us so hard. Man.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Hey, let's start a crowdfunding stuff. They don't want you
to know, sessing a fund all right.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
I will personally put the money that we were going
to spend on Dave and Busters into this.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Oh heck, yeah, dude, we got like fifty bucks.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
I know, I know, what's that our twelve minutes of
fun it David Busters will put it in the sky.
Let's do it.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
Uh Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
This this kid, and I think it is right to
call him a kid. At this time, he is putting
his efforts into creating reality from his dream. By the
time he is twenty years old in the late seventies,
he's racked up about one hundred and fifty hours of
total flying time. It sounds like a lot. And this
(08:11):
is something that surprised me as well when I was
first looking into getting a pilot license. One hundred and
fifty hours is not actually as much as we non
pilots might assume. I mean, if you've listened to this
show long enough, then you have spent the hours you
could have spent acquiring a pilot license. I mean, look again,
(08:37):
not all licenses are created equally in the world of aviation,
just like in the world of driving craft on the
ground or craft on the ground. What a weird way
to refer to cars. You know, there are greats, right,
You got to get a commercial driver's license a CDL.
If you want to drive a tractor trailer kind of truck.
(09:00):
You need a different license for motorcycles, so on and
so forth. It absolutely makes sense that there would be
similar hierarchies in the world of aviation.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Yeah, just what type of vehicle are you? Are you?
I do like saying piloting. I'm going to think about
me piloting my camera? Now, WHOA. So let's talk about
the requirements. I'm just going to read this verbatim, Ben,
This is from the FAA. They require quote a minimum
of forty hours flight time in the US. And again
(09:33):
that's a minimum, right, And this is to obtain a license,
correct Ben?
Speaker 3 (09:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah, And let's just continue here. The average number of
hours for persons without a hearing impairment completing the private
pilot certification requirements is approximately seventy five hours. So hey,
at least in the FAA standards, Frederick doubled their private
certification requirements.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Right yeah, and this in the US it breaks down
to at least twenty hours of that time has to
be flight training from an authorized instructor, and then ten
hours of solo flight training in a couple of different ways,
(10:22):
and then three hours across country, like they break it down.
And in Australia they've got something similar. You have to
successfully we're reading verbatim from the Australian authorities here, you
have to successfully complete an integrated or non integrated training course.
Integrated training requires ten hours solo flight, twenty five hours
(10:45):
with a copilot, and then a non integrated course requires
five extra hours of flight time. Integrated, non integrated. For
our purposes today, it just means going to a one
stop shop versus get it piece meal. And obviously in
both countries, a commercial pilot license has more stringent requirements
(11:10):
because you are getting potentially more than one hundred people
to just hang out with you in the back and
hope you know what you're doing.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Well, let's talk about the importance of integrated type of
training where you're at one facility, you're basically on a
course to get your pilot's license with that facility and
those trainers. Because of the really the barriers to entry
for a pilot's license that you already mentioned been time
(11:40):
and money. Often what people do, and I have a
couple of friends who did this, they will piecemeal out
that pilot's license over a course of years just to
be able to save up the money to take certain
lessons and then save up some more take some more
lessons and just do that over and over, and often
(12:00):
that will be at different locations, even across states sometimes,
so you just again, it makes sense that they're going
to separate that out in Australia between integrated and non integrated.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Yeah, and this is a practical skill, not an academic skill,
by which we mean if you want to practice law
in the US or Australia, you will need to attend
a university, some sort of accredited institution. You're usually going
to attend that one for the majority of your training.
(12:36):
But in this situation, you can piecemeal things out and Matt,
I just looked at it. Here in Atlanta, one of
the first places we find talks about not the bare
minimum of FAA requirement. They talk about the typical number
of flight hours it takes for a student to receive
(12:59):
their certain and that would clock in at fifty five
to sixty five hours. So yeah, anyway, slice, what we're
noting here is that Valentine is a pilot, but our
buddy Frederick is a relatively inexperienced pilot.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
The young man.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
He's a young guy. The year before our story takes place,
he had already acquired his private license and he had
an instrument rating that was considered Class four. It meant
that he could fly at night when our story occurs,
or on the way to our story, but only if
(13:38):
the weather was nice. What is referred to as visual
meteorological conditions. So this is not your guy for the typhoon.
This is not your guy for incredibly dangerous weather.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Yeah, or really even flying through just heavily clouded weather right.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Right right, flying through a cloud could actually get him
in trouble.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
It's visual meteorological so like I can see that night,
which really does play into our story here. This is
very very important or keep that in mind.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Yeah, let's talk about the night. Let's just get right
to it. So it's a Saturday night. The guy's not
out at a honky tonk. He's not out hobnobbin with
the Bogans or whatever he is.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
What is that hobnoggin with hob nobbin with the Bogans.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Bogan would be oh and shout out to our friend Patrese,
listener of the show. A Bogan would be kind of
the equivalent of a chob in the UK or a Redbeck.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Oh, okay, got it, Okay, got it.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
So he's not out partying. It's October twenty first, nineteen
seventy eight. It's very late afternoon, early evening. He takes
what appears to be his last flight. And to get
information about this, we went to the official report. You
can find it in a couple of different places, but
(15:11):
we found it on one of our favorite sites for
quite some time, the Blackfault dot com.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Oh Man, the Black Vault, shout out. So let's begin here.
On the afternoon of the twenty first of October nineteen
seventy eight, Frederick attended to the Moribon Briefing Office obtained
a meteorological briefing and at seventeen twenty three hours that's
five twenty three local time, submitted a flight plan for
(15:40):
a night VMC flight from Morbon to King Island and
to return.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
And we're reading this report verbatim. So there's a little
bit of shorthand there's a little bit of terminology and nomenclature,
but worry not, you'll get the just folks, the report continues.
The cruising altitude nominated in the flight plan was below
(16:06):
five thousand feet, with estimated time intervals of forty one
minutes to Cape Otway and twenty eight minutes from Cape
Otway to King Island. The total fuel endurance was shown
as three hundred minutes. The pilot made no arrangements for
aerodome lighting to be eliminated for his arrival at King Island.
(16:30):
He advised the briefing officer and the operator's representative that
he was uplifting friends at King Island and took four
life jackets in the aircraft with him, which would be
a typical safety precaution. So essentially he's saying, Hey, I
want to go here and I'm going to pick up
(16:51):
my crew, right, So this is all above board. This
all makes sense, and dive into the report further in
a moment, but.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Let's quickly break just to say that was sixty minutes
of flight time to get to King Island. He had
three hundred minutes of fuel in you know, in tow.
Theoretically that all sounds fine to me. I'm just thinking
of getting back from King Island to if they were
if he was making a return flight, which he was, right,
(17:22):
that's what he stated to return, that's another seventy minutes, right,
which theoretically he's only going to use half his fuel.
Although if he is bringing four people on or potentially
four other people on, or I guess it would be
three friends on, the weight could affect that. Just something
to think about while we're talking about the story.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
Yeah, very important point during the flight is in contact
with the Melbourne Flight Service Unit or FSU. And shout
out again to all our Australian conspiracy realists who have
taught us the correct way to say Melboyne.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Yes, And to all folks working in flight service units
or air traffic controllers.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
Oh my gosh, the most one of the most stressful
jobs have you ever met? People?
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Oh? Professional, very close friends who have done that.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Now, yeah, you know there are awesome people, very punctual people.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Time is important.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
Their brain is never off work. Yeah, so so our
guy Fred. He takes off around six nineteen local time.
His final communication begins at about seven oh six pm
and the end of that occurs at seven eleven PM,
so a very small span of just about five minutes.
(18:49):
And in that roughly five minute conversation, his last with
the known world, he says some unusual, disturbing stuff. You
can read the full transcript. We might put it in
a future episode. It's something that haunts researchers in the
modern day. And maybe, Matt, maybe we can give people
just a taste of it.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Oh sure, I would say read the whole thing if
you get a chance, or wait until we put it out,
because we're gonna we'll do something with this. I promise
we'll do something interesting with this. But here is what
Valentich said, quote, my intentions are to go to King Island, Melbourne.
That strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again.
(19:32):
Then there's two seconds of an open microphone, which just
means it's as if you push the button to talk
right and you haven't let go of the button yet,
but you're not saying anything. It's just aircraft sound that
the FSU's hearing. Then Valentich says, it is hovering and
it's not an aircraft.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
And so Frederick Valentich, in the middle of clear weather
with life wind, disappeared. To this day, his body has
never been found. What happened. We'll pause for a word
from our sponsors and we'll return. Here's where it gets crazy.
(20:21):
So this story always held the interest of Sleuth's and ufologist,
especially because of some of the other stuff he says
in that final conversation, and most particularly because he says,
whatever I'm seeing is not an aircraft. But it gained
brand new mainstream prominence a couple of years ago, pretty
(20:44):
recently via TikTok. A TikTok channel named at theory Area
posted a video about this incident on December third, twenty
twenty one.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah, and it's a TikTok video that generally I would criticize,
like that kind of thing where it's just bite sized content,
doesn't give you the context. It's not enough for you
to really understand what's going on. It's just enough for
you to watch the thing and maybe like it or
share it, right, and you know, I would feel critical
about it. But if you do go and watch this video,
(21:16):
you're actually getting quite a bit of the known information.
It does actually contain quite a bit of stuff that
you should know to understand the story.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
Yeah, agreed. I mean, we always have to be careful
when we're looking at that sort of the micro fiction
or micro faction of social media platforms right of the
dopamine casino. But the facts here by large correct as
presented in that video. Balanchech did make the flight, Frederick
(21:50):
did have an increasingly strange conversation with Melbourne, and yes,
he did disappear. The report stated that he said he
was gonna fly over a Cape Otway and then head
to his final destination, King Island. It specifically mentions that
he departs as we said six nineteen local time. He
(22:12):
does arrive in the Cape Otway area forty one minutes later,
so our train is running on time. At seven oh six,
he gets on the radio, he begins that infamous final conversation.
We have both read the transcript and we will do
something with it. You'll see in that transcript there's a
(22:34):
reason he's calling them he's not just like checking in.
He he's not catching up on top of the pops
or whatever. He wants them to know that he has
seen what he believes to be an unidentified aircraft following
him at an altitude of four thousand, five hundred feet
(22:56):
And they check every law they have and they say, well,
a guy, there's no known traffic at that altitude. And
he says, okay, I get it, but I have a
visual on this. It's something.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
It's a craft.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
It's big. I don't know what it is. It looks
like it has four bright lights illuminating it. It is
passing a thousand feet above me right now, and it's
moving at a high speed. It's coming at me from
the east. I think whomever is piloting this vessel, this
craft is hazing me, is messing with me for fun.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Yeah. Yeah, it gets weird. And just to clarify there,
Frederick is flying at four five hundred feet at least
that's what he describes as his altitude in the transcript, right,
so this thing is like fifty five hundred or more
above him, and you know, he's talking about hazing potentially,
(23:56):
but he describes it very strangely and This is another
key point here in the story. Frederick describes the aircraft
as quote orbiting above him, and he also at one
point says he's orbiting, which is interesting. We can get
into that later. But this thing, he describes it as
(24:16):
orbiting above him, and it had some kind of shiny
metal surface, it had a green light on it, and
he reported that his plane was having engine problems, and
at least you can infer that in his mind it
was because of whatever this aircraft was doing. And if that,
if those things aren't strange enough, we go back to
(24:39):
that quote that we read right before the break. It's
not an aircraft, that is that is very strange because
when he is describing it as not an aircraft, at
least according to some later reporting and some discussion by
folks who were actually those fsu FO were listening to
(25:01):
the radio transmission, there was some kind of metallic scraping
sounds that were going on. They're emanating from Frederick's radio microphone. Okay,
so that's occurring within his plane or near his plane,
or outside of his plane. It's audible on the microphone,
which is pretty strange, right.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Yeah, Yeah, And also it's it's strange that it's strange
that this is reported so quickly after the events. After
the incident, there's a Melbourne based paper called The Age
that talks about metallic scraping sound the last audio that
(25:47):
has heard from the FSU over there in Melbourne, and
so they launch a search and they don't wait, you
know what I mean. It's not like this guy just
miss some text or miss some calls. The conversation cuts abruptly.
It sounds like he encountered something anomalous. So the laws
(26:08):
on the case. They search land and sea in the area.
There's an RAF lockey that joins, along some boats and
eight civilian aircraft. They search pretty thoroughly. Eventually they cover
over a thousand square miles and Frederick and the Cessna
are ghosts. There's no sign of it, and they continue searching.
(26:32):
On October twenty fifth, they call off the investigation. And
to this day, in twenty twenty three, is we record this.
The official conclusion of the Australian dot Department of Transport
is the cause of the disappearance is unknown, but quote
presumed fatal for Frederick valatage.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
But that's only where this journey begins for us. Everybody
we're just getting started here. So then before we jump
into some of the theories behind maybe what happened, I just
want to describe something that I don't know. It's it's
more of a feeling, I guess because I get a
(27:15):
visualization of some of this from the transcript. That metallic
scraping sound an object that's hazing because it's he says,
it's like coming at his plane and then leaving, and
then coming back, and then leaves for a while, completely
buzzing him. Yeah, but then we'll all of a sudden
be back and then that metallic scraping sound. In my mind,
(27:38):
it's some kind of and this is just my Hollywood version, right,
some kind of large ship that could in a way
ingest a smaller craft, right, like take it in to
its body, in some way, into its hull where that
metal scraping sound is actually grasping some kind of mechanism
(28:02):
grasping onto his plane and pulling it up into a
cargo hold or something.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
You know.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
That's that's at least the visual that I get.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
I'm so in I'm okay, never mind, No, we're not
doing the rest of it. That's what I choose to
believe that's too cool to not be the truth. I guess,
Because I guess. Because we're already here, we can tell
you the less compelling theories. Other other the theory.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
That that's the that's a fever dream that this story
conjures in my mind.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Could I to have a dream and it is yours? Here,
here's one of the So as soon as this happens,
this is a tragic loss of human life. That's what
it seems to be. No one has heard from this
guy since as far as we can tell, investigators have
no shortage of theories. Some are mundane, all are speculative,
(29:03):
and some range more into the world of the esoteric.
So one of the first common things people ask is
he's going over water, right for part of this? What
if he's disoriented? What if he's flying upside down and
he somehow mistakes the lights of his own cessna as
(29:23):
the lights of a separate entity. He sees them reflecting
on water, on the surface of the water, and he
thinks that's a totally different thing. Similar to how some
animals might see themselves in a mirror and react aggressively
because they think they're being confronted by a different animal.
(29:44):
That's okay. So that's an initial thing, but there's some
problems with it. Right, First, we know the type of
sesities flying has what's called a gravity feed fuel system,
meaning that if he turned upside down and somehow he
was not aware he was upside down, I'm sorry, it's
all milkshake. He wouldn't have been able to fly like
(30:05):
this for very long at all. The engine would have sputtered,
it would have cut, and that concept of the engine cutting.
People who believed he was flying upside down they used
the end of the transcript as evidence for that. And
you know, some people also speculated that he had attempted
(30:25):
to take his own life. But there's so many problems
aside from the gravity fuel line. Everyone who knew him, family, friends, acquaintances,
none of them believed that suicide or self harm was
on the table. And there was an interesting thing we
found that again is contemporary. On October twenty fifth, a
(30:48):
paper interviews a guy named Arthur Shutt. Schutt head of
a private aviation company, and he says, he says the
quiet part out loud. He's very diplomatic about it and
beat me here, Paul. But what he's saying again very politely,
is how the would someone not know their upside down?
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Yeah, it doesn't matter what kind of straps you got
on your aircraft. If you're flying upside upside down, you're
not the only thing that's upside down. It's everything else
inside the plane that's upside down, and things fall because
of that old gravity thing, and you'd notice stuff around
(31:32):
you just going funk.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Well, also, you're you would notice the change and the
passage of your blood. Right because he's at a low
enough altitude, Yeah, you know what I mean. The guy's
not in outer space. He's not nowhere near like the
bug limit or whatever. So it's there is a funny
historical bit there what our guy Arthur says. He says,
(31:59):
the carpet comes out of the floor, the butt's fall
out of the ash tray. And that took me a
second until I realized it's the seventies and it was
way more common for people to smoke on planes.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
And put carpet on their planes too.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
And put carpet the other planes too. So I guess
it's possible that he ended up upside down for a
very short amount of time, but it does not seem
likely that he would have continued without realizing what happened,
despite his relative greenness, his lack of experience. So I
(32:33):
think that leads us to inevitably conclude, you know, it's UFOs.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Well, let me say one more thing on that, because
I think even though he's an inexperienced he's young. He's
flying in the whatever the meteorological conditions he's supposed to
be flying in, he's allowed to fly. Then if he
was upside down and he was seeing that green light
from one of his wings right or his tail whatever,
(33:00):
tail light, whatever, the green light that he did report seeing,
if he's upside down and he's seeing that reflected in
the water, he's reporting to the FSU that it's a
thousand feet away from him. He's looking at his gauges
just a few moments before that, saying I'm at forty
five hundred feet and this light is a thousand feet away.
(33:22):
So he would have to be so disoriented to not
only be flying upside down and not know it, but
he wouldn't be able to tell that the light reflecting
in the water was actually, you know, thirty five hundred
feet away or further. So I don't know. To me,
it's just another it's another thing that tells me that
(33:42):
probably isn't what happened.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, And ufologists love
this story. Right, there's no shortage of breathless claims going.
You know what really happened. Frederick was destroyed by aliens.
He was abducted by aliens. Think about it. You need
to think about the evidence, right.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
Yeah, can we clip that and just play that at
my funeral? Frederick was abducted by a car.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Okay, so right, I will make yet again a wonderful
impression on your family. So unfortunately, there's not a lot
of compelling evidence for the idea here the UFO theory.
Those reports that you mentioned, Matt, of the green light
(34:32):
that Frederick mentions the second time he describes light. You know,
at first he talks about these four bright lights, then
he talks about seeing this green light, this metallic sheen.
Eyewitness reports, if you do a cursory check, they appear
to back that up. But the green light aspect of
(34:53):
the report comes out after the transcript of his conversation
with Melbourne goes public, and after that eyewitness is asked
a couple of years later again like we see that,
we see so often things evolve, they change. People are
(35:14):
sort of crowdsourcing a narrative.
Speaker 4 (35:17):
Right.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
That's the reason why I've for a couple of decades
more and more people were in Dallas when JFK was shot. Right,
more and more people than the actual population of Dallas
were on that street somehow, and they super duper remember it.
I remember it, Bro, you were there, Yeah, well you
were actually you were there.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Oh yeah, totally. We're not involved now. I was just
getting coffee with George bus It was. It was no
big deal.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
I had to meet some folks down a hill. You
get in situations. But but right, so, okay, so we know,
the eyewitness thing kind of changes. Found this excellent, excellent
investigation over its skeptical inquirer co written by an author
(36:06):
named Joe Nicol with a pilot, a veteran and an
astronomer named James mcgaha, and they go hard on the paint.
They trace out the timeline. A witness on the ground
who described having seen a green light just above Valentinch's
plane had not mentioned that aspect of his story at
(36:28):
the time. However, many years later, after the green light
was made public, he did mention this detail, but he
is only identified by a pseudonym. The eyewitness story it
seems changed.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
Oh boy, oh boy. All right, well, here's the part
that makes me a little sad but also excited about
the UFO thing. It does both for me, and its
details coming from Frederick's father about his enthusiasm around the
UFO subject, because remember we're talking nineteen seventies here. He
(37:07):
wasn't that old, born in the fifties, and Frederick was
really into UFOs reportedly, and his dad backs that up.
And this is a quote from that Skeptical Inquirer article
earlier that year. According to his father, Frederick had himself
observed a UFO moving away very fast, and he had
expressed to his father his worry about what could happen
(37:30):
if such presumed extraterrestrial craft should ever attack. So, when
we think about it, Frederick in his mind already had
this scenario, right, it existed there in his mind palace
before perhaps it actually occurred, or before something like it.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
Occurred mind palace. I like it. I wasn't expecting a
mind palace today. Yeah, you're right, you're right, in a
in a real way. He had primed himself arguably, And
when you are a hammer. Everything looks like a nail,
you know, that's the tendency. And there's an additional wrinkle here.
(38:14):
We found several claims that Frederick wasn't entirely honest about
the purpose of his final flight. Earlier, we said, you know,
from the official report, he's going to go pick up
some friends, hence the life jackets, the life preservers. Other
sources say that's not true. He was going to go
pick up some crayfish. Turns out he, as far as
(38:37):
King Island is concerned, none of that's true because he
didn't bother following the sop standard operating procedure to inform
King Island of his intent to land. He told Melbourne
what he was doing, and I guess he was just gonna,
pardon the gallows humor, wing it over at King Island,
(39:00):
you know, get by on his charm and his wit.
Dude was just out there. And if this sounds mysterious,
we should also know it may be the result of
inexperience rather than conspiracy. Remember, you have failed the Air
Force exam multiple times. We alluded to this, but you
should also know before this flight he was involved in
(39:25):
three flying mishaps that got him on the wrong side
of the authorities. Once he got a warning because he
unknowingly strayed into restricted airspace, which people are very sensitive about.
And twice he was cited for purposely flying blindly into
a cloud, and at the time of his disappearance, this
(39:46):
very well still could have led to legal consequences because
flying blind into a cloud, what's in there? Another airplane?
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Yeah, maybe a flock of geese. No, probably not, by.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
The fight of seagulls, birds, balloons.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
Birds are dangerous and if you're flying blindly into anything,
depending on how high up you are, it could be
really bad, really really.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yeah, and especially in a smaller craft one.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
And uh, the other thing I would just want to
point out here we mentioned the reason why he didn't
make it into the Australian Air Force was because of
educational deficiencies. That is an amorphous phrase, right, That could
mean a whole bunch of different things. But it could
mean lack of follow through on procedures, right, I mean,
(40:36):
it could mean that. That's speculation on my part, but
it could be a problem that he had, right he
would he knew the steps he needed to take, but
he didn't always follow all of them. Maybe or he
didn't remember all of the steps in any given moment.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Just a possibility, yeah, because again it's such a vague,
amorphous term. Anyway, the idea, like his less than spotless record,
his fascination with UFOs, et cetera, et cetera, These factors
lead multiple researchers to speculate he was actually flying out
not to meet people, not to pick up some fresh seafood,
(41:15):
which is a shame because that's great, but expressly to
look for UFOs. Whether or not that's the case, it
is possible that Frederick Valentich was psychologically primed to interpret
any anomalous activity, any unusual phenomenon he saw up there
as a UFO sighting, And if he felt he encountered
(41:37):
something like this, he would have likely become an inexperienced
pilot distracted by what he thought was a UFO sighting
and focusing entirely on that instead of, you know, keeping
the plane in the air, And that might have been
the problem. Unless there's another wrinkle, a bit of a
(41:59):
Shyamalan twist here. Unless he did it all on purpose
and like some people argue, faked his death. What are
we talking about. We'll tell you after a word from
our sponsors.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
And we're back. Before we jump into the faking your
death part, Ben just want to point out the adrenaline
that would be surging through his body if he truly
believed a UFO was above him, flying near him, flashing
lights at him, getting his attention, maybe even just hovering
or orbiting above his plane. I mean, it would have
(42:41):
for me if that was happening, it would have taken
over everything in my mind, at least if I.
Speaker 3 (42:48):
Feel that absolutely, yeah, it would naturally, it would naturally
dominate your bandwidth, right.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Oh yeah, oh chemically a visual even here, like I
can I can imagine, like I wouldn't be able to
focus on anything else but the concept that he possibly
did this entire thing, this entire flight, even getting a
pilot's licning. I I'm just really interested, what if he
(43:18):
did the whole thing to fake his death? Do we
have any evidence for this or why do we think this?
Speaker 3 (43:23):
A lot of it is the interpretation, the preconceptions of
the people positing the theory, right, the idea that this
guy was on a long con to commit pseudo side,
and all pseudo side is a long con. And again
we're legally required to tell you. It is way more
difficult to do than you think. A lot of people
(43:48):
have problems with the two fundamental factors in any successful
pseudo side or faking of one's death. One don't try
to get money from your death. They'll find you. And two,
don't talk to anybody the old you really needs to
be dead as far as everyone you know is concerned.
(44:10):
That's how the majority of people get caught. If he
decided to disappear on purpose, then he would have had
to successfully followed through on those two things for decades,
you know, since the late nineteen seventies. We know that
the plane could have taken him somewhere else. Maybe, so
(44:31):
this is what theorists propose. They say, despite great weather,
the aircraft was never spotted on radar, so maybe it
never even made it to Cape outway. Maybe it was
going somewhere else the whole time. And additionally, Melbourne police
received reports of a mysterious unidentified light aircraft landing not
(44:56):
far from the Cape right around the time of the
guy's disappearance. And these these were not experts in the field,
so they wouldn't be able to say this is a cessna,
this is a, so and so they just said, we
know this is a small airplane. We don't know who
is piloting it, we don't know where it's from, but
we saw at land. We're calling the police. WHOA I mean? Okay,
(45:22):
that seems to kind of make sense until we fast
forward five years after the disappearance in nineteen seventy eight,
and we see that in nineteen eighty three, parts of
an aircraft wreckage with serial numbers with partially matching serial
numbers were found in a nearby strait, specifically, a component
(45:45):
of a plane called an engine cowl flap. It washed
ashore in a place called Finders Island, and in July
of nineteen eighty three, the Bureau of Air Safety Investigation
asked to outfit called the Royal Australian Navy the Research
Laboratory or ran RAN RAN rule. Okay, they asked rand
(46:08):
Rule about the likelihood that this cowl flap, this component
may have traveled to this ultimate position where it washed
ashore from the area where Frederick's aircraft disappeared. And those
serial numbers do partially match up. It's not absolutely conclusive,
but it's pretty convincing circumstantial evidence for a crash because
(46:32):
no other missing aircraft fit the bill in just this way.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
This is easy to explain away. And this is something
Ala Peterson would advise you to do. That's a comedy
Bang Bang character played by Paula Twkins. You should listen
to Ala Peterson's stories. What if you did successfully land
that sesna, But it's not your sesna, You've just rented it.
So you need to land the plane to get yourself
(46:58):
to safety, to wherever it is you're going to escape to.
But that plane is evidence. What are you gonna do
with that plane? I know we're gonna destroy it. We're
gonna blow the sucker up, and we're gonna make sure
we do it. We put parts of it into the
ocean that would plausibly be where the airplane crash. My
dogs are real excited about this idea.
Speaker 3 (47:19):
So you're raising a great point. You know, if someone
really did want to disappear, maybe they could destroy the plane.
Speaker 2 (47:25):
Yeah, I I'm joking, though, I mean it's possibly.
Speaker 3 (47:28):
That's the thing. All of these are possible. Some are
more probable than others, but all of these are possible.
Let's end tonight with the most plausible current conclusion. Let's
let us practice to move the mind and picture our
pal Frederick distracted by a craft or phenomenon that he
(47:49):
cannot identify. For experienced pilots like our guys from Skeptical Inquerere,
this means that Frederick may have been deceived by what
it's called the quote illusion of a tilted horizon.
Speaker 4 (48:03):
Not you.
Speaker 3 (48:04):
Paul and I were talking about this a little bit
off air for us non pilots. How can we understand
this thing?
Speaker 2 (48:14):
Well, the way Paul and I were talking about it
was with Microsoft flight simulator when we were kids.
Speaker 3 (48:19):
Oh wow, yeah, I remember.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
And we're just thinking about the heads up display you
get in that game of the horizon line right, and
it just lets you know your what is it your angle?
I was gonna say angle of attack, but that's not
what it is. It's the angle that your plane is
oriented to the horizon line. So are you going straight
right on that? Or are you tilted downwards toward the
(48:42):
earth or upwards away from the Earth. And if you
imagine on that sessna, he doesn't have a heads up display.
He's got a window that he can see out of,
and then he's got his instrumentation down below him or
around him. And if you just imagine that he's distracted
(49:04):
visually by stuff that's going on around him that you
can see out of his windows, maybe he's not looking
at that instrumentation that's letting him know how his plane
is oriented. And there's a weird thing that happens that
we didn't know about when Paul and I were discussing
it earlier. We didn't know this could even happen. Ben
that visually, you could think that you are flying with
(49:27):
the horizon like perfectly level, but you are not.
Speaker 3 (49:32):
And then from that, from that misconception, that misperception, you
may attempt to adjust your flight right. You may think
you're flying level. You may be fly level and think
you're not flying level right, and so you attempt to
adjust to level your wings back to where they need
(49:53):
to be. But you start to spiral, to circle downward,
slowly at first, and then with it escalates increasing speed,
increasing acceleration, you become increasingly disoriented in space. And so
to Nickel Ed mcgaha, this means that Frederick Valentiche enters
(50:18):
what's called a graveyard spiral, a situation not to be envy.
So he is focused on what he thinks is a UFO.
He's talking to Melbourne FSU and he starts spiraling the
entirety of the way down. This is too much stress
on the plane. He realizes things are fou bar we
(50:41):
at FSU, hear that screeching metallic noise, and then we
hear no more. This could explain the eyewitness accounts too.
I mean, the sessen is close enough to the land
at a low enough altitude for that eyewitness to see it,
and it's really three eyewitness because two of his nieces
(51:01):
were there. There's an a possible explanation for the light.
So I can't believe I'm using so many hand gestures
in an audio show. But okay, so the I was
trying to right.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
It helps your brain. I think you're right.
Speaker 3 (51:18):
I think you're right.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (51:19):
So if you're the guy on the ground, you're looking
at this. The aircraft is trying to correct what the
pilot sees as its orientation in space, and they start banking.
They can bank such that they're leaning over sideways kind of,
and the right wing tip is up it looks like
(51:43):
it's above the plane for a perceiver from the ground,
and that right wing tip has a navigation light on it,
and that navigation light is green in color, so if
you're looking at this happen evening is drawing on, you
could mistake it for a second separate craft, for the
(52:03):
green light flying above. But that still doesn't explain the
first four lights. Frederick reports, Oh.
Speaker 2 (52:11):
No, it does not, and there's an explanation for it.
But I don't know, you guys, you don't love it.
I don't know when I think about reporting about lights
that I feel are a thousand feet above me in
a plane, I don't think about this. Venus, Mars, Mercury,
(52:36):
and Antaes a star a very bright star, very bright,
super bright, but also stars.
Speaker 3 (52:48):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you can't you can't drive to them. Yet.
There's what the most plausible mundane explanation we can find
propose for those four lights is based on computer searches
of the sky for the daytime and place of at
least part of Frederick's flight, And it's highly possible that
(53:14):
the things he saw were those four planetary, heavily celestial
bodies that Matt just named. And if you are a
human who's already primed to look for an entity, singular
entity or UFO, then it's possible that you would have
seen those and assumed they were a shape, that they
(53:36):
were forming the points of a diamond, especially if you're
already kind of hoping to see a UFO.
Speaker 2 (53:43):
I hear that like edges of a shape, and then
inside that shape it might appear. It might, I'm saying,
might appear as a metallic object, like a dark black
metallic object that you can't perceive because there's no light
underneath it. But wouldn't there aren't there other stars in
(54:04):
between those that you ah, And if you're in a cessna,
you're looking out the side I guess of a window
to look up and see it, So then maybe you
look out the other side, but you're strapped. It's just
hard for me to physically understand him in that pilot's
seat observing all that stuff. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (54:25):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know if it proposes a solution
to the investigation, but it doesn't get us across the
finish line. Yeah, it's not one hundred percent, and I
wish we could say it was, But it seems that
with all this in mind, what we can say is
Frederick Valentich did definitely see some things that he himself
(54:49):
could not identify, and they probably weren't aliens, but a
little twist, as is our wont at the end of stuff,
they don't want you to know. If he was distracted
by Venus, Mars Mercury and that very bright star, and
if there was life on any of those, then I
(55:11):
think it's fair to say he was distracted by aliens.
They were just fought. They were just the way further
away than he thought.
Speaker 2 (55:20):
The ataries. Oh man, there are a lot of construction
sounds happening in my house right now. I apologize, Paul,
that's more work for you. But and you're gonna hear
him in the episode too, I apologize for that. And dogs,
it's just a noisy day over here. I'm distracted. Maybe
it's a UFO. I am holding out, guys, I'm holding
(55:41):
out that something nuts happened to Frederick. And even if
his plane did crash, I don't think he did. I
think he went with somebody and that's why the plane crashed.
I like that.
Speaker 3 (55:54):
I like that. Let's do just a quick bit of cocktail.
If he were alive today, he would be sixty five
years old, so well within the realm of possibility. If
he still remains on Earth.
Speaker 2 (56:11):
Yeah, I don't think. I think he's going to live
to four thy fifty because he's got he's got all
the tech. Now he's got time dilation. Oh yeah, he's
good to go forever probably.
Speaker 3 (56:23):
And you know what, while we're doing this, while we're
playing these reindeer games, isn't everyone just an object in space? Right? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (56:32):
We're just, you know, strapped to this planet like some
kind of moss that can talk.
Speaker 3 (56:37):
And can we really even identify ourselves? How well do
we know ourselves? You know? I wish everyone could see
this shrunk at this point, I think we call it.
We would love to hear your takes on this mysterious case,
and even more importantly, folks, we would love to hear
some of your favorite strange and or obscure tales of
(56:59):
alleged UFO or paranormal encounters in your neck of the
global woods. Take us to the edge of the rabbit hole.
We'll do the rest. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube,
farmers Only, MySpace, Pinterest.
Speaker 2 (57:17):
Karahit is that a dating thing? I don't know, we're
not here.
Speaker 3 (57:24):
Yeah, right, find our tender So if you don't conspiracy stuff,
conspiracy stuff, show some derivation thereof. If you don't sip
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directly via a handy telephonic device.
Speaker 2 (57:46):
That's right. Our number is Say it with us one
eight three three st d w y t K. It's
a voicemail system. Oh, it's a voicemail system. You got
three minutes. Give us a cool nickname, now your government name.
Say whatever you'd like, as long as at some point
in that message say whether or not we can use
your message and voice on the air, or if you
(58:08):
don't want us to. It's that easy. Do you think
we could put like the whole show on a dating
site like the three or four or five of us.
Let's say, everybody, we're all on a dating site as
a show, and you can take the show out on
a date. Has anybody ever done that? It's I think
(58:30):
that would be fun. Call us with your ideas. If
you don't want to use your phone, why not instead
send us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 4 (58:38):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (59:00):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
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Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Our colleague Nol is not here but will be returning shortly.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer, all mission control decand most importantly, you are you.
Speaker 4 (00:38):
You are here and.
Speaker 3 (00:39):
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to
know now. Longtime listeners, fellow conspiracy realist, over the years,
you may have clocked something that has occurred to Matt
and I as well. It seems as if every single
country across the planet has a few UFO or UAP stories.
(01:03):
In tonight's episode, we're heading over to the Southern Hemisphere. Hello,
fellow conspiracy realists from Australia and all points south. Australia
is home to some of the most unique animals and
biomes on the planet. I mean, Matt, I believe it's
true that for both of us we've never been to
(01:26):
Australia physically, but we want to go. Is that correct?
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Ready? When you are Australia. Just send us a plane,
preferably a larger one than the one we're going to
be talking about today, and we'll get on it and
we'll fly to you.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
We'll need a little more than the range of Assessna
for that one, or maybe just a lot of layovers.
Get pretty creative with where our crossings are. So Australia
is it turns out, also a hotbed of alleged UFO
activity and all all sorts of conspiratorial lore. It's home
to pine and gap. I think most famously that would
(02:05):
be the that would be the prominent conspiratorial subject on
the continent. But tonight's question is about a specific person,
a young man, a budding pilot named Frederick Valentiche. What
happened to him? Here are the facts. This kid was
(02:26):
going places. He was born on June ninth, nineteen fifty eight,
and for a lot of his life he was one
of those people who always knew what they wanted to do.
He had a dream, you know, and that's relatively noble
and rare, I would say a lot of people growing
(02:48):
up drift, you know. We try on different versions of
ourselves until we find the one that.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Fits absolutely and often when you hear about truly remarkable
people who who have put their stamp on the world
in some way, they share this thing that Frederick has,
where they're just driven by some unknown force from an
early age on a mission really to accomplish something.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Yeah, at some point early in his life, young fred
looked up at the sky and it stayed with him.
He had a lifelong interest in all things aviation, all
aerial phenomena, and his father described him as a quote
UFO fanatic from an early age, and he said, you know,
(03:36):
my son was always watching movies about extraterrestrials. He would
keep an eye out for anything in the news about
a possible UFO. And keep in mind, of course, this
is before the age of the public internet. So this
kid was making scrapbooks. He was taking scissors and clipping
(03:58):
out newspaper report so sidings and collecting them for himself.
He joined theaf the Royal Australian Air Force Training Corps,
think of it sort of like an ROTC equivalent, And
originally he wanted to be a military pilot, and he
(04:18):
tried to enlist twice. He was rejected each time. Apparently,
as far as we can tell, because of his lack
of educational qualifications. That's another way of saying he failed
a couple of components of these exams multiple times, but
he didn't give up. He decided he would qualify for
(04:41):
a pilot license on his own, because, as we know,
you don't have to be in the military to pilot
and aircraft in Australia or in the US. You can
totally get a different kind of license, right, different kinds
of qualifications.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
Yeah, maybe it's something everybody knows, but I didn't realize
for a long time that getting a pilot's license doesn't
mean you need to own an aircraft or right have
your own aircraft. I didn't understand that you could rent
out an aircraft in the same way that you could,
let's say, rent a boat. If your family ever went
on a vacation one time to a lake, and you
(05:21):
can rent a boat out. But you know, in the boat,
you don't even really need a license, a specific license
for that. For an aircraft, it's a little more particular
because it is a very different type of machine you're
piloting there. But I guess I just in my head,
getting a pilot's license is the equivalent of just getting
(05:41):
a driver's license being able to control a certain type
of craft.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
Yeah, yeah, well said, it's also pretty expensive in terms
of time and in terms of money. We of course,
we have friends, I think mutual and then just ends
outside of the show who have followed in Frederick's footsteps.
They went and got their own pilot licenses. You can
(06:08):
get one to just be a private pilot. You don't
have to own a plane, like you said, Matt, you know,
I mean that might sound weird for some of us,
but the perhaps the most readily available comparison is the
driver's license. You don't have to own a car to
have a driver's license, but if you are ever driving
(06:30):
a car and someone asked whether you can drive that
car legally, you gotta have your little card, you know
what I mean.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
I think personally, just for me, it was such an
unattainable thing. Like a pilot's license is something that a
pilot is or a future pilot is going to do.
Somebody who's going to fly for an airline, or like
Frederick is going to be a pilot for the military.
In some regard, you don't just get a pilot's license.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
I think we should seriously consider at least one of
us having one, just to be prepared. Okay, let's yeah,
because we've got a local We've got a local airfield
here a little bit closer to your side of town
that will rent out planes and we'll provide instruction.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Oh dude, they're peppered all around this place.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
They're just going to tax us so hard. Man.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
Hey, let's start a crowdfunding stuff. They don't want you
to know, sessing a fund all right.
Speaker 3 (07:32):
I will personally put the money that we were going
to spend on Dave and Busters into this.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Oh heck, yeah, dude, we got like fifty bucks.
Speaker 3 (07:40):
I know, I know, what's that our twelve minutes of
fun it David Busters will put it in the sky.
Let's do it.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
Uh Yeah.
Speaker 3 (07:47):
This this kid, and I think it is right to
call him a kid. At this time, he is putting
his efforts into creating reality from his dream. By the
time he is twenty years old in the late seventies,
he's racked up about one hundred and fifty hours of
total flying time. It sounds like a lot. And this
(08:11):
is something that surprised me as well when I was
first looking into getting a pilot license. One hundred and
fifty hours is not actually as much as we non
pilots might assume. I mean, if you've listened to this
show long enough, then you have spent the hours you
could have spent acquiring a pilot license. I mean, look again,
(08:37):
not all licenses are created equally in the world of aviation,
just like in the world of driving craft on the
ground or craft on the ground. What a weird way
to refer to cars. You know, there are greats, right,
You got to get a commercial driver's license a CDL.
If you want to drive a tractor trailer kind of truck.
(09:00):
You need a different license for motorcycles, so on and
so forth. It absolutely makes sense that there would be
similar hierarchies in the world of aviation.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Yeah, just what type of vehicle are you? Are you?
I do like saying piloting. I'm going to think about
me piloting my camera? Now, WHOA. So let's talk about
the requirements. I'm just going to read this verbatim, Ben,
This is from the FAA. They require quote a minimum
of forty hours flight time in the US. And again
(09:33):
that's a minimum, right, And this is to obtain a license,
correct Ben?
Speaker 3 (09:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (09:40):
Yeah, And let's just continue here. The average number of
hours for persons without a hearing impairment completing the private
pilot certification requirements is approximately seventy five hours. So hey,
at least in the FAA standards, Frederick doubled their private
certification requirements.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
Right yeah, and this in the US it breaks down
to at least twenty hours of that time has to
be flight training from an authorized instructor, and then ten
hours of solo flight training in a couple of different ways,
(10:22):
and then three hours across country, like they break it down.
And in Australia they've got something similar. You have to
successfully we're reading verbatim from the Australian authorities here, you
have to successfully complete an integrated or non integrated training course.
Integrated training requires ten hours solo flight, twenty five hours
(10:45):
with a copilot, and then a non integrated course requires
five extra hours of flight time. Integrated, non integrated. For
our purposes today, it just means going to a one
stop shop versus get it piece meal. And obviously in
both countries, a commercial pilot license has more stringent requirements
(11:10):
because you are getting potentially more than one hundred people
to just hang out with you in the back and
hope you know what you're doing.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
Well, let's talk about the importance of integrated type of
training where you're at one facility, you're basically on a
course to get your pilot's license with that facility and
those trainers. Because of the really the barriers to entry
for a pilot's license that you already mentioned been time
(11:40):
and money. Often what people do, and I have a
couple of friends who did this, they will piecemeal out
that pilot's license over a course of years just to
be able to save up the money to take certain
lessons and then save up some more take some more
lessons and just do that over and over, and often
(12:00):
that will be at different locations, even across states sometimes,
so you just again, it makes sense that they're going
to separate that out in Australia between integrated and non integrated.
Speaker 3 (12:13):
Yeah, and this is a practical skill, not an academic skill,
by which we mean if you want to practice law
in the US or Australia, you will need to attend
a university, some sort of accredited institution. You're usually going
to attend that one for the majority of your training.
(12:36):
But in this situation, you can piecemeal things out and Matt,
I just looked at it. Here in Atlanta, one of
the first places we find talks about not the bare
minimum of FAA requirement. They talk about the typical number
of flight hours it takes for a student to receive
(12:59):
their certain and that would clock in at fifty five
to sixty five hours. So yeah, anyway, slice, what we're
noting here is that Valentine is a pilot, but our
buddy Frederick is a relatively inexperienced pilot.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
The young man.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
He's a young guy. The year before our story takes place,
he had already acquired his private license and he had
an instrument rating that was considered Class four. It meant
that he could fly at night when our story occurs,
or on the way to our story, but only if
(13:38):
the weather was nice. What is referred to as visual
meteorological conditions. So this is not your guy for the typhoon.
This is not your guy for incredibly dangerous weather.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Yeah, or really even flying through just heavily clouded weather right.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Right right, flying through a cloud could actually get him
in trouble.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
It's visual meteorological so like I can see that night,
which really does play into our story here. This is
very very important or keep that in mind.
Speaker 3 (14:14):
Yeah, let's talk about the night. Let's just get right
to it. So it's a Saturday night. The guy's not
out at a honky tonk. He's not out hobnobbin with
the Bogans or whatever he is.
Speaker 2 (14:30):
What is that hobnoggin with hob nobbin with the Bogans.
Speaker 3 (14:34):
Bogan would be oh and shout out to our friend Patrese,
listener of the show. A Bogan would be kind of
the equivalent of a chob in the UK or a Redbeck.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
Oh, okay, got it, Okay, got it.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
So he's not out partying. It's October twenty first, nineteen
seventy eight. It's very late afternoon, early evening. He takes
what appears to be his last flight. And to get
information about this, we went to the official report. You
can find it in a couple of different places, but
(15:11):
we found it on one of our favorite sites for
quite some time, the Blackfault dot com.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Oh Man, the Black Vault, shout out. So let's begin here.
On the afternoon of the twenty first of October nineteen
seventy eight, Frederick attended to the Moribon Briefing Office obtained
a meteorological briefing and at seventeen twenty three hours that's
five twenty three local time, submitted a flight plan for
(15:40):
a night VMC flight from Morbon to King Island and
to return.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
And we're reading this report verbatim. So there's a little
bit of shorthand there's a little bit of terminology and nomenclature,
but worry not, you'll get the just folks, the report continues.
The cruising altitude nominated in the flight plan was below
(16:06):
five thousand feet, with estimated time intervals of forty one
minutes to Cape Otway and twenty eight minutes from Cape
Otway to King Island. The total fuel endurance was shown
as three hundred minutes. The pilot made no arrangements for
aerodome lighting to be eliminated for his arrival at King Island.
(16:30):
He advised the briefing officer and the operator's representative that
he was uplifting friends at King Island and took four
life jackets in the aircraft with him, which would be
a typical safety precaution. So essentially he's saying, Hey, I
want to go here and I'm going to pick up
(16:51):
my crew, right, So this is all above board. This
all makes sense, and dive into the report further in
a moment, but.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
Let's quickly break just to say that was sixty minutes
of flight time to get to King Island. He had
three hundred minutes of fuel in you know, in tow.
Theoretically that all sounds fine to me. I'm just thinking
of getting back from King Island to if they were
if he was making a return flight, which he was, right,
(17:22):
that's what he stated to return, that's another seventy minutes, right,
which theoretically he's only going to use half his fuel.
Although if he is bringing four people on or potentially
four other people on, or I guess it would be
three friends on, the weight could affect that. Just something
to think about while we're talking about the story.
Speaker 3 (17:44):
Yeah, very important point during the flight is in contact
with the Melbourne Flight Service Unit or FSU. And shout
out again to all our Australian conspiracy realists who have
taught us the correct way to say Melboyne.
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Yes, And to all folks working in flight service units
or air traffic controllers.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
Oh my gosh, the most one of the most stressful
jobs have you ever met? People?
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Oh? Professional, very close friends who have done that.
Speaker 3 (18:17):
Now, yeah, you know there are awesome people, very punctual people.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
Time is important.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
Their brain is never off work. Yeah, so so our
guy Fred. He takes off around six nineteen local time.
His final communication begins at about seven oh six pm
and the end of that occurs at seven eleven PM,
so a very small span of just about five minutes.
(18:49):
And in that roughly five minute conversation, his last with
the known world, he says some unusual, disturbing stuff. You
can read the full transcript. We might put it in
a future episode. It's something that haunts researchers in the
modern day. And maybe, Matt, maybe we can give people
just a taste of it.
Speaker 2 (19:09):
Oh sure, I would say read the whole thing if
you get a chance, or wait until we put it out,
because we're gonna we'll do something with this. I promise
we'll do something interesting with this. But here is what
Valentich said, quote, my intentions are to go to King Island, Melbourne.
That strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again.
(19:32):
Then there's two seconds of an open microphone, which just
means it's as if you push the button to talk
right and you haven't let go of the button yet,
but you're not saying anything. It's just aircraft sound that
the FSU's hearing. Then Valentich says, it is hovering and
it's not an aircraft.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
And so Frederick Valentich, in the middle of clear weather
with life wind, disappeared. To this day, his body has
never been found. What happened. We'll pause for a word
from our sponsors and we'll return. Here's where it gets crazy.
(20:21):
So this story always held the interest of Sleuth's and ufologist,
especially because of some of the other stuff he says
in that final conversation, and most particularly because he says,
whatever I'm seeing is not an aircraft. But it gained
brand new mainstream prominence a couple of years ago, pretty
(20:44):
recently via TikTok. A TikTok channel named at theory Area
posted a video about this incident on December third, twenty
twenty one.
Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah, and it's a TikTok video that generally I would criticize,
like that kind of thing where it's just bite sized content,
doesn't give you the context. It's not enough for you
to really understand what's going on. It's just enough for
you to watch the thing and maybe like it or
share it, right, and you know, I would feel critical
about it. But if you do go and watch this video,
(21:16):
you're actually getting quite a bit of the known information.
It does actually contain quite a bit of stuff that
you should know to understand the story.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
Yeah, agreed. I mean, we always have to be careful
when we're looking at that sort of the micro fiction
or micro faction of social media platforms right of the
dopamine casino. But the facts here by large correct as
presented in that video. Balanchech did make the flight, Frederick
(21:50):
did have an increasingly strange conversation with Melbourne, and yes,
he did disappear. The report stated that he said he
was gonna fly over a Cape Otway and then head
to his final destination, King Island. It specifically mentions that
he departs as we said six nineteen local time. He
(22:12):
does arrive in the Cape Otway area forty one minutes later,
so our train is running on time. At seven oh six,
he gets on the radio, he begins that infamous final conversation.
We have both read the transcript and we will do
something with it. You'll see in that transcript there's a
(22:34):
reason he's calling them he's not just like checking in.
He he's not catching up on top of the pops
or whatever. He wants them to know that he has
seen what he believes to be an unidentified aircraft following
him at an altitude of four thousand, five hundred feet
(22:56):
And they check every law they have and they say, well,
a guy, there's no known traffic at that altitude. And
he says, okay, I get it, but I have a
visual on this. It's something.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
It's a craft.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
It's big. I don't know what it is. It looks
like it has four bright lights illuminating it. It is
passing a thousand feet above me right now, and it's
moving at a high speed. It's coming at me from
the east. I think whomever is piloting this vessel, this
craft is hazing me, is messing with me for fun.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Yeah. Yeah, it gets weird. And just to clarify there,
Frederick is flying at four five hundred feet at least
that's what he describes as his altitude in the transcript, right,
so this thing is like fifty five hundred or more
above him, and you know, he's talking about hazing potentially,
(23:56):
but he describes it very strangely and This is another
key point here in the story. Frederick describes the aircraft
as quote orbiting above him, and he also at one
point says he's orbiting, which is interesting. We can get
into that later. But this thing, he describes it as
(24:16):
orbiting above him, and it had some kind of shiny
metal surface, it had a green light on it, and
he reported that his plane was having engine problems, and
at least you can infer that in his mind it
was because of whatever this aircraft was doing. And if that,
if those things aren't strange enough, we go back to
(24:39):
that quote that we read right before the break. It's
not an aircraft, that is that is very strange because
when he is describing it as not an aircraft, at
least according to some later reporting and some discussion by
folks who were actually those fsu FO were listening to
(25:01):
the radio transmission, there was some kind of metallic scraping
sounds that were going on. They're emanating from Frederick's radio microphone. Okay,
so that's occurring within his plane or near his plane,
or outside of his plane. It's audible on the microphone,
which is pretty strange, right.
Speaker 3 (25:23):
Yeah, Yeah, And also it's it's strange that it's strange
that this is reported so quickly after the events. After
the incident, there's a Melbourne based paper called The Age
that talks about metallic scraping sound the last audio that
(25:47):
has heard from the FSU over there in Melbourne, and
so they launch a search and they don't wait, you
know what I mean. It's not like this guy just
miss some text or miss some calls. The conversation cuts abruptly.
It sounds like he encountered something anomalous. So the laws
(26:08):
on the case. They search land and sea in the area.
There's an RAF lockey that joins, along some boats and
eight civilian aircraft. They search pretty thoroughly. Eventually they cover
over a thousand square miles and Frederick and the Cessna
are ghosts. There's no sign of it, and they continue searching.
(26:32):
On October twenty fifth, they call off the investigation. And
to this day, in twenty twenty three, is we record this.
The official conclusion of the Australian dot Department of Transport
is the cause of the disappearance is unknown, but quote
presumed fatal for Frederick valatage.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
But that's only where this journey begins for us. Everybody
we're just getting started here. So then before we jump
into some of the theories behind maybe what happened, I just
want to describe something that I don't know. It's it's
more of a feeling, I guess because I get a
(27:15):
visualization of some of this from the transcript. That metallic
scraping sound an object that's hazing because it's he says,
it's like coming at his plane and then leaving, and
then coming back, and then leaves for a while, completely
buzzing him. Yeah, but then we'll all of a sudden
be back and then that metallic scraping sound. In my mind,
(27:38):
it's some kind of and this is just my Hollywood version, right,
some kind of large ship that could in a way
ingest a smaller craft, right, like take it in to
its body, in some way, into its hull where that
metal scraping sound is actually grasping some kind of mechanism
(28:02):
grasping onto his plane and pulling it up into a
cargo hold or something.
Speaker 4 (28:06):
You know.
Speaker 2 (28:08):
That's that's at least the visual that I get.
Speaker 3 (28:10):
I'm so in I'm okay, never mind, No, we're not
doing the rest of it. That's what I choose to
believe that's too cool to not be the truth. I guess,
Because I guess. Because we're already here, we can tell
you the less compelling theories. Other other the theory.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
That that's the that's a fever dream that this story
conjures in my mind.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Could I to have a dream and it is yours? Here,
here's one of the So as soon as this happens,
this is a tragic loss of human life. That's what
it seems to be. No one has heard from this
guy since as far as we can tell, investigators have
no shortage of theories. Some are mundane, all are speculative,
(29:03):
and some range more into the world of the esoteric.
So one of the first common things people ask is
he's going over water, right for part of this? What
if he's disoriented? What if he's flying upside down and
he somehow mistakes the lights of his own cessna as
(29:23):
the lights of a separate entity. He sees them reflecting
on water, on the surface of the water, and he
thinks that's a totally different thing. Similar to how some
animals might see themselves in a mirror and react aggressively
because they think they're being confronted by a different animal.
(29:44):
That's okay. So that's an initial thing, but there's some
problems with it. Right, First, we know the type of
sesities flying has what's called a gravity feed fuel system,
meaning that if he turned upside down and somehow he
was not aware he was upside down, I'm sorry, it's
all milkshake. He wouldn't have been able to fly like
(30:05):
this for very long at all. The engine would have sputtered,
it would have cut, and that concept of the engine cutting.
People who believed he was flying upside down they used
the end of the transcript as evidence for that. And
you know, some people also speculated that he had attempted
(30:25):
to take his own life. But there's so many problems
aside from the gravity fuel line. Everyone who knew him, family, friends, acquaintances,
none of them believed that suicide or self harm was
on the table. And there was an interesting thing we
found that again is contemporary. On October twenty fifth, a
(30:48):
paper interviews a guy named Arthur Shutt. Schutt head of
a private aviation company, and he says, he says the
quiet part out loud. He's very diplomatic about it and
beat me here, Paul. But what he's saying again very politely,
is how the would someone not know their upside down?
Speaker 2 (31:10):
Yeah, it doesn't matter what kind of straps you got
on your aircraft. If you're flying upside upside down, you're
not the only thing that's upside down. It's everything else
inside the plane that's upside down, and things fall because
of that old gravity thing, and you'd notice stuff around
(31:32):
you just going funk.
Speaker 3 (31:34):
Well, also, you're you would notice the change and the
passage of your blood. Right because he's at a low
enough altitude, Yeah, you know what I mean. The guy's
not in outer space. He's not nowhere near like the
bug limit or whatever. So it's there is a funny
historical bit there what our guy Arthur says. He says,
(31:59):
the carpet comes out of the floor, the butt's fall
out of the ash tray. And that took me a
second until I realized it's the seventies and it was
way more common for people to smoke on planes.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
And put carpet on their planes too.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
And put carpet the other planes too. So I guess
it's possible that he ended up upside down for a
very short amount of time, but it does not seem
likely that he would have continued without realizing what happened,
despite his relative greenness, his lack of experience. So I
(32:33):
think that leads us to inevitably conclude, you know, it's UFOs.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Well, let me say one more thing on that, because
I think even though he's an inexperienced he's young. He's
flying in the whatever the meteorological conditions he's supposed to
be flying in, he's allowed to fly. Then if he
was upside down and he was seeing that green light
from one of his wings right or his tail whatever,
(33:00):
tail light, whatever, the green light that he did report seeing,
if he's upside down and he's seeing that reflected in
the water, he's reporting to the FSU that it's a
thousand feet away from him. He's looking at his gauges
just a few moments before that, saying I'm at forty
five hundred feet and this light is a thousand feet away.
(33:22):
So he would have to be so disoriented to not
only be flying upside down and not know it, but
he wouldn't be able to tell that the light reflecting
in the water was actually, you know, thirty five hundred
feet away or further. So I don't know. To me,
it's just another it's another thing that tells me that
(33:42):
probably isn't what happened.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, And ufologists love
this story. Right, there's no shortage of breathless claims going.
You know what really happened. Frederick was destroyed by aliens.
He was abducted by aliens. Think about it. You need
to think about the evidence, right.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
Yeah, can we clip that and just play that at
my funeral? Frederick was abducted by a car.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
Okay, so right, I will make yet again a wonderful
impression on your family. So unfortunately, there's not a lot
of compelling evidence for the idea here the UFO theory.
Those reports that you mentioned, Matt, of the green light
(34:32):
that Frederick mentions the second time he describes light. You know,
at first he talks about these four bright lights, then
he talks about seeing this green light, this metallic sheen.
Eyewitness reports, if you do a cursory check, they appear
to back that up. But the green light aspect of
(34:53):
the report comes out after the transcript of his conversation
with Melbourne goes public, and after that eyewitness is asked
a couple of years later again like we see that,
we see so often things evolve, they change. People are
(35:14):
sort of crowdsourcing a narrative.
Speaker 4 (35:17):
Right.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
That's the reason why I've for a couple of decades
more and more people were in Dallas when JFK was shot. Right,
more and more people than the actual population of Dallas
were on that street somehow, and they super duper remember it.
I remember it, Bro, you were there, Yeah, well you
were actually you were there.
Speaker 2 (35:37):
Oh yeah, totally. We're not involved now. I was just
getting coffee with George bus It was. It was no
big deal.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
I had to meet some folks down a hill. You
get in situations. But but right, so, okay, so we know,
the eyewitness thing kind of changes. Found this excellent, excellent
investigation over its skeptical inquirer co written by an author
(36:06):
named Joe Nicol with a pilot, a veteran and an
astronomer named James mcgaha, and they go hard on the paint.
They trace out the timeline. A witness on the ground
who described having seen a green light just above Valentinch's
plane had not mentioned that aspect of his story at
(36:28):
the time. However, many years later, after the green light
was made public, he did mention this detail, but he
is only identified by a pseudonym. The eyewitness story it
seems changed.
Speaker 2 (36:43):
Oh boy, oh boy. All right, well, here's the part
that makes me a little sad but also excited about
the UFO thing. It does both for me, and its
details coming from Frederick's father about his enthusiasm around the
UFO subject, because remember we're talking nineteen seventies here. He
(37:07):
wasn't that old, born in the fifties, and Frederick was
really into UFOs reportedly, and his dad backs that up.
And this is a quote from that Skeptical Inquirer article
earlier that year. According to his father, Frederick had himself
observed a UFO moving away very fast, and he had
expressed to his father his worry about what could happen
(37:30):
if such presumed extraterrestrial craft should ever attack. So, when
we think about it, Frederick in his mind already had
this scenario, right, it existed there in his mind palace
before perhaps it actually occurred, or before something like it.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
Occurred mind palace. I like it. I wasn't expecting a
mind palace today. Yeah, you're right, you're right, in a
in a real way. He had primed himself arguably, And
when you are a hammer. Everything looks like a nail,
you know, that's the tendency. And there's an additional wrinkle here.
(38:14):
We found several claims that Frederick wasn't entirely honest about
the purpose of his final flight. Earlier, we said, you know,
from the official report, he's going to go pick up
some friends, hence the life jackets, the life preservers. Other
sources say that's not true. He was going to go
pick up some crayfish. Turns out he, as far as
(38:37):
King Island is concerned, none of that's true because he
didn't bother following the sop standard operating procedure to inform
King Island of his intent to land. He told Melbourne
what he was doing, and I guess he was just gonna,
pardon the gallows humor, wing it over at King Island,
(39:00):
you know, get by on his charm and his wit.
Dude was just out there. And if this sounds mysterious,
we should also know it may be the result of
inexperience rather than conspiracy. Remember, you have failed the Air
Force exam multiple times. We alluded to this, but you
should also know before this flight he was involved in
(39:25):
three flying mishaps that got him on the wrong side
of the authorities. Once he got a warning because he
unknowingly strayed into restricted airspace, which people are very sensitive about.
And twice he was cited for purposely flying blindly into
a cloud, and at the time of his disappearance, this
(39:46):
very well still could have led to legal consequences because
flying blind into a cloud, what's in there? Another airplane?
Speaker 2 (39:55):
Yeah, maybe a flock of geese. No, probably not, by.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
The fight of seagulls, birds, balloons.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
Birds are dangerous and if you're flying blindly into anything,
depending on how high up you are, it could be
really bad, really really.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
Yeah, and especially in a smaller craft one.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
And uh, the other thing I would just want to
point out here we mentioned the reason why he didn't
make it into the Australian Air Force was because of
educational deficiencies. That is an amorphous phrase, right, That could
mean a whole bunch of different things. But it could
mean lack of follow through on procedures, right, I mean,
(40:36):
it could mean that. That's speculation on my part, but
it could be a problem that he had, right he
would he knew the steps he needed to take, but
he didn't always follow all of them. Maybe or he
didn't remember all of the steps in any given moment.
Speaker 3 (40:52):
Just a possibility, yeah, because again it's such a vague,
amorphous term. Anyway, the idea, like his less than spotless record,
his fascination with UFOs, et cetera, et cetera, These factors
lead multiple researchers to speculate he was actually flying out
not to meet people, not to pick up some fresh seafood,
(41:15):
which is a shame because that's great, but expressly to
look for UFOs. Whether or not that's the case, it
is possible that Frederick Valentich was psychologically primed to interpret
any anomalous activity, any unusual phenomenon he saw up there
as a UFO sighting, And if he felt he encountered
(41:37):
something like this, he would have likely become an inexperienced
pilot distracted by what he thought was a UFO sighting
and focusing entirely on that instead of, you know, keeping
the plane in the air, And that might have been
the problem. Unless there's another wrinkle, a bit of a
(41:59):
Shyamalan twist here. Unless he did it all on purpose
and like some people argue, faked his death. What are
we talking about. We'll tell you after a word from
our sponsors.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
And we're back. Before we jump into the faking your
death part, Ben just want to point out the adrenaline
that would be surging through his body if he truly
believed a UFO was above him, flying near him, flashing
lights at him, getting his attention, maybe even just hovering
or orbiting above his plane. I mean, it would have
(42:41):
for me if that was happening, it would have taken
over everything in my mind, at least if I.
Speaker 3 (42:48):
Feel that absolutely, yeah, it would naturally, it would naturally
dominate your bandwidth, right.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Oh yeah, oh chemically a visual even here, like I
can I can imagine, like I wouldn't be able to
focus on anything else but the concept that he possibly
did this entire thing, this entire flight, even getting a
pilot's licning. I I'm just really interested, what if he
(43:18):
did the whole thing to fake his death? Do we
have any evidence for this or why do we think this?
Speaker 3 (43:23):
A lot of it is the interpretation, the preconceptions of
the people positing the theory, right, the idea that this
guy was on a long con to commit pseudo side,
and all pseudo side is a long con. And again
we're legally required to tell you. It is way more
difficult to do than you think. A lot of people
(43:48):
have problems with the two fundamental factors in any successful
pseudo side or faking of one's death. One don't try
to get money from your death. They'll find you. And two,
don't talk to anybody the old you really needs to
be dead as far as everyone you know is concerned.
(44:10):
That's how the majority of people get caught. If he
decided to disappear on purpose, then he would have had
to successfully followed through on those two things for decades,
you know, since the late nineteen seventies. We know that
the plane could have taken him somewhere else. Maybe, so
(44:31):
this is what theorists propose. They say, despite great weather,
the aircraft was never spotted on radar, so maybe it
never even made it to Cape outway. Maybe it was
going somewhere else the whole time. And additionally, Melbourne police
received reports of a mysterious unidentified light aircraft landing not
(44:56):
far from the Cape right around the time of the
guy's disappearance. And these these were not experts in the field,
so they wouldn't be able to say this is a cessna,
this is a, so and so they just said, we
know this is a small airplane. We don't know who
is piloting it, we don't know where it's from, but
we saw at land. We're calling the police. WHOA I mean? Okay,
(45:22):
that seems to kind of make sense until we fast
forward five years after the disappearance in nineteen seventy eight,
and we see that in nineteen eighty three, parts of
an aircraft wreckage with serial numbers with partially matching serial
numbers were found in a nearby strait, specifically, a component
(45:45):
of a plane called an engine cowl flap. It washed
ashore in a place called Finders Island, and in July
of nineteen eighty three, the Bureau of Air Safety Investigation
asked to outfit called the Royal Australian Navy the Research
Laboratory or ran RAN RAN rule. Okay, they asked rand
(46:08):
Rule about the likelihood that this cowl flap, this component
may have traveled to this ultimate position where it washed
ashore from the area where Frederick's aircraft disappeared. And those
serial numbers do partially match up. It's not absolutely conclusive,
but it's pretty convincing circumstantial evidence for a crash because
(46:32):
no other missing aircraft fit the bill in just this way.
Speaker 2 (46:36):
This is easy to explain away. And this is something
Ala Peterson would advise you to do. That's a comedy
Bang Bang character played by Paula Twkins. You should listen
to Ala Peterson's stories. What if you did successfully land
that sesna, But it's not your sesna, You've just rented it.
So you need to land the plane to get yourself
(46:58):
to safety, to wherever it is you're going to escape to.
But that plane is evidence. What are you gonna do
with that plane? I know we're gonna destroy it. We're
gonna blow the sucker up, and we're gonna make sure
we do it. We put parts of it into the
ocean that would plausibly be where the airplane crash. My
dogs are real excited about this idea.
Speaker 3 (47:19):
So you're raising a great point. You know, if someone
really did want to disappear, maybe they could destroy the plane.
Speaker 2 (47:25):
Yeah, I I'm joking, though, I mean it's possibly.
Speaker 3 (47:28):
That's the thing. All of these are possible. Some are
more probable than others, but all of these are possible.
Let's end tonight with the most plausible current conclusion. Let's
let us practice to move the mind and picture our
pal Frederick distracted by a craft or phenomenon that he
(47:49):
cannot identify. For experienced pilots like our guys from Skeptical Inquerere,
this means that Frederick may have been deceived by what
it's called the quote illusion of a tilted horizon.
Speaker 4 (48:03):
Not you.
Speaker 3 (48:04):
Paul and I were talking about this a little bit
off air for us non pilots. How can we understand
this thing?
Speaker 2 (48:14):
Well, the way Paul and I were talking about it
was with Microsoft flight simulator when we were kids.
Speaker 3 (48:19):
Oh wow, yeah, I remember.
Speaker 2 (48:21):
And we're just thinking about the heads up display you
get in that game of the horizon line right, and
it just lets you know your what is it your angle?
I was gonna say angle of attack, but that's not
what it is. It's the angle that your plane is
oriented to the horizon line. So are you going straight
right on that? Or are you tilted downwards toward the
(48:42):
earth or upwards away from the Earth. And if you
imagine on that sessna, he doesn't have a heads up display.
He's got a window that he can see out of,
and then he's got his instrumentation down below him or
around him. And if you just imagine that he's distracted
(49:04):
visually by stuff that's going on around him that you
can see out of his windows, maybe he's not looking
at that instrumentation that's letting him know how his plane
is oriented. And there's a weird thing that happens that
we didn't know about when Paul and I were discussing
it earlier. We didn't know this could even happen. Ben
that visually, you could think that you are flying with
(49:27):
the horizon like perfectly level, but you are not.
Speaker 3 (49:32):
And then from that, from that misconception, that misperception, you
may attempt to adjust your flight right. You may think
you're flying level. You may be fly level and think
you're not flying level right, and so you attempt to
adjust to level your wings back to where they need
(49:53):
to be. But you start to spiral, to circle downward,
slowly at first, and then with it escalates increasing speed,
increasing acceleration, you become increasingly disoriented in space. And so
to Nickel Ed mcgaha, this means that Frederick Valentiche enters
(50:18):
what's called a graveyard spiral, a situation not to be envy.
So he is focused on what he thinks is a UFO.
He's talking to Melbourne FSU and he starts spiraling the
entirety of the way down. This is too much stress
on the plane. He realizes things are fou bar we
(50:41):
at FSU, hear that screeching metallic noise, and then we
hear no more. This could explain the eyewitness accounts too.
I mean, the sessen is close enough to the land
at a low enough altitude for that eyewitness to see it,
and it's really three eyewitness because two of his nieces
(51:01):
were there. There's an a possible explanation for the light.
So I can't believe I'm using so many hand gestures
in an audio show. But okay, so the I was
trying to right.
Speaker 2 (51:15):
It helps your brain. I think you're right.
Speaker 3 (51:18):
I think you're right.
Speaker 2 (51:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (51:19):
So if you're the guy on the ground, you're looking
at this. The aircraft is trying to correct what the
pilot sees as its orientation in space, and they start banking.
They can bank such that they're leaning over sideways kind of,
and the right wing tip is up it looks like
(51:43):
it's above the plane for a perceiver from the ground,
and that right wing tip has a navigation light on it,
and that navigation light is green in color, so if
you're looking at this happen evening is drawing on, you
could mistake it for a second separate craft, for the
(52:03):
green light flying above. But that still doesn't explain the
first four lights. Frederick reports, Oh.
Speaker 2 (52:11):
No, it does not, and there's an explanation for it.
But I don't know, you guys, you don't love it.
I don't know when I think about reporting about lights
that I feel are a thousand feet above me in
a plane, I don't think about this. Venus, Mars, Mercury,
(52:36):
and Antaes a star a very bright star, very bright,
super bright, but also stars.
Speaker 3 (52:48):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you can't you can't drive to them. Yet.
There's what the most plausible mundane explanation we can find
propose for those four lights is based on computer searches
of the sky for the daytime and place of at
least part of Frederick's flight, And it's highly possible that
(53:14):
the things he saw were those four planetary, heavily celestial
bodies that Matt just named. And if you are a
human who's already primed to look for an entity, singular
entity or UFO, then it's possible that you would have
seen those and assumed they were a shape, that they
(53:36):
were forming the points of a diamond, especially if you're
already kind of hoping to see a UFO.
Speaker 2 (53:43):
I hear that like edges of a shape, and then
inside that shape it might appear. It might, I'm saying,
might appear as a metallic object, like a dark black
metallic object that you can't perceive because there's no light
underneath it. But wouldn't there aren't there other stars in
(54:04):
between those that you ah, And if you're in a cessna,
you're looking out the side I guess of a window
to look up and see it, So then maybe you
look out the other side, but you're strapped. It's just
hard for me to physically understand him in that pilot's
seat observing all that stuff. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (54:25):
Yeah, yeah, I don't know if it proposes a solution
to the investigation, but it doesn't get us across the
finish line. Yeah, it's not one hundred percent, and I
wish we could say it was, But it seems that
with all this in mind, what we can say is
Frederick Valentich did definitely see some things that he himself
(54:49):
could not identify, and they probably weren't aliens, but a
little twist, as is our wont at the end of stuff,
they don't want you to know. If he was distracted
by Venus, Mars Mercury and that very bright star, and
if there was life on any of those, then I
(55:11):
think it's fair to say he was distracted by aliens.
They were just fought. They were just the way further
away than he thought.
Speaker 2 (55:20):
The ataries. Oh man, there are a lot of construction
sounds happening in my house right now. I apologize, Paul,
that's more work for you. But and you're gonna hear
him in the episode too, I apologize for that. And dogs,
it's just a noisy day over here. I'm distracted. Maybe
it's a UFO. I am holding out, guys, I'm holding
(55:41):
out that something nuts happened to Frederick. And even if
his plane did crash, I don't think he did. I
think he went with somebody and that's why the plane crashed.
I like that.
Speaker 3 (55:54):
I like that. Let's do just a quick bit of cocktail.
If he were alive today, he would be sixty five
years old, so well within the realm of possibility. If
he still remains on Earth.
Speaker 2 (56:11):
Yeah, I don't think. I think he's going to live
to four thy fifty because he's got he's got all
the tech. Now he's got time dilation. Oh yeah, he's
good to go forever probably.
Speaker 3 (56:23):
And you know what, while we're doing this, while we're
playing these reindeer games, isn't everyone just an object in space? Right? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (56:32):
We're just, you know, strapped to this planet like some
kind of moss that can talk.
Speaker 3 (56:37):
And can we really even identify ourselves? How well do
we know ourselves? You know? I wish everyone could see
this shrunk at this point, I think we call it.
We would love to hear your takes on this mysterious case,
and even more importantly, folks, we would love to hear
some of your favorite strange and or obscure tales of
(56:59):
alleged UFO or paranormal encounters in your neck of the
global woods. Take us to the edge of the rabbit hole.
We'll do the rest. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube,
farmers Only, MySpace, Pinterest.
Speaker 2 (57:17):
Karahit is that a dating thing? I don't know, we're
not here.
Speaker 3 (57:24):
Yeah, right, find our tender So if you don't conspiracy stuff,
conspiracy stuff, show some derivation thereof. If you don't sip
the social nets, have no fear. You can contact us
directly via a handy telephonic device.
Speaker 2 (57:46):
That's right. Our number is Say it with us one
eight three three st d w y t K. It's
a voicemail system. Oh, it's a voicemail system. You got
three minutes. Give us a cool nickname, now your government name.
Say whatever you'd like, as long as at some point
in that message say whether or not we can use
your message and voice on the air, or if you
(58:08):
don't want us to. It's that easy. Do you think
we could put like the whole show on a dating
site like the three or four or five of us.
Let's say, everybody, we're all on a dating site as
a show, and you can take the show out on
a date. Has anybody ever done that? It's I think
(58:30):
that would be fun. Call us with your ideas. If
you don't want to use your phone, why not instead
send us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 4 (58:38):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (59:00):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio
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Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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