September 22, 2022 • 57 mins
This week I’m doing my first interview with George Simpson about his new book, Nothing on Radar: The Valentich Mystery
One of Australia's greatest Aviation mysteries, Nothing on Radar, tells the story of a young pilot, Frederick Valentich, who flew from Melbourne toward King Island in Bass Strait early one evening, in October 1978 and vanished right after reporting his Cessna Aircraft was being chased by an Unidentified Flying Object. The pilot and his aircraft were never seen again in spite of a thorough air and sea search lasting almost a full week. Newspapers, radio and television covered the story which began as an account of a missing aircraft and ended up detailing the young pilot's unusual encounter and description of a very fast moving object which defied description, which flew outside the bounds of known aeronautical physics.
This is an account of the event as it unfolded, from the author's perspective, from meeting Witnesses, from hearing news reports to meeting members of the missing pilots family, from meeting an Ex NASA scientist who wrote about the case, and from UFO researchers who studied the case as it happened. This conversation is like no other you will find out of Australia! Enjoy!
One of Australia's greatest Aviation mysteries, Nothing on Radar, tells the story of a young pilot, Frederick Valentich, who flew from Melbourne toward King Island in Bass Strait early one evening, in October 1978 and vanished right after reporting his Cessna Aircraft was being chased by an Unidentified Flying Object. The pilot and his aircraft were never seen again in spite of a thorough air and sea search lasting almost a full week. Newspapers, radio and television covered the story which began as an account of a missing aircraft and ended up detailing the young pilot's unusual encounter and description of a very fast moving object which defied description, which flew outside the bounds of known aeronautical physics.
This is an account of the event as it unfolded, from the author's perspective, from meeting Witnesses, from hearing news reports to meeting members of the missing pilots family, from meeting an Ex NASA scientist who wrote about the case, and from UFO researchers who studied the case as it happened. This conversation is like no other you will find out of Australia! Enjoy!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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Okay. Australia, the sixth largestcountry on Earth, an ancient, rugged,
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and unforgiving land with abundant animal life, both beautiful and deadly. Found
within its all inspiring landscapes and naturalbeauty. Exists a d history of unexplained
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mysteries for anyone with the courage toinvestigate them. Tonight we joined Ben on
a journey across this vast island continentin search of answers to events that have
reshaped the lives of so many thathave been exposed to Unexplained Phenomena Australia with
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your host Ben Hurled. Get everyone, and welcome to another episode of Unexplained
Phenomena Australia. And it is absolutelyfantastic to have my first live interview on
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this show. After about we're upto about twenty episodes now. It gives
me great pleasure to welcome long timeAustralian UFO researcher and good friend George Simpson
to the show. Welcome George.Yeah, good to see you then.
Yeah, fantastic to see you too. And I just wanted to sort of
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just quickly start off by just talkingbriefly about how I actually met you in
the first place. So I hadbeen back in the mid two thousands,
I'd been reading the Ufologist magazine andyou had your regular featuring there and yeah,
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and I had seen that you werein Victoria, and I reached out
to you and I said that Iwas interested in being involved in in UFO
research. And at that time,you were holding meetings in Chelsea, and
I came down and I came toprobably about two or three of those meetings,
and I met you first of allthrough the meetings that you were held
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in Chelsea. And that would bearound about twenty ten sometime, so okay,
right, yeah, so that wasthat was when I first met you.
And but you've been around the UFOscene for a very very long time,
and I just wanted to maybe ifyou could give us a little bit
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of background on when the interest startednew and your journey through what you've done
in the UFO veled up until today. Well, really it was because of
watching television when I was a kidum science fiction. Really I never got
into Star Trek in any sense atall, but years before Star Trek came
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on, there was a TV sciencefiction show called The Outer Limits, and
that there was a different alien onTV. Every week and so and we
all collected the Bubblegum cards and watchedall these TV shows. You know,
there's arguments at home with most sistersbecause I wanted to watch that show every
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week and they wanted to watch somethingelse. And there was only one TV
and the TV was black and whitetoo, so I got to see every
second episode that came on air.But they had these sci fi stories and
they had a different alien every week, so that really intrigued me. And
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you know, that was in theearly days of the space race. It
was pre Apollo, so they hadthe Gemini spacecraft. Then those little Gemini
spacecrafts were going into orbit and stuffwith people in them, the little tin
can you know that David Bowie issinging about, I'm up in this tin
can. They were the Gemini things, I think, and then with Apolo
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Apolo, everything got more sophisticated andbefore we knew it, they'll get they
were going to go to the Moon. So there was a book at school
that I read. They made usread books at school. They taught us
how to read, and then theymade us read them. You had to
pick a book out of the libraryand read it. And I found one
called Flying Sources, Where Do TheyCome From? Right by an Australian author
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called Richard Tambling. Yes, andI saw that in the library, so
I borrowed that and I read thatand it's really I think it's the first
book I've actually read, you know, the first book I read all the
way through and it was all aboutall these different UFO sightings all over Australia,
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and I was hooked from then on. But there was also stories of
uphone encounters and things that were goingon around that time as well. You
know, over during those years,there was all kinds of cases happening,
Yeah, and they were being reportedin the news and so they always stood
out in my mind, you know, all these from things that were going
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on. I remember the Tully,the Tully Source and nests being in the
news. Yes, that was aroundthe time in my childhood, you know,
when I was in primary school,and I was in primary school at
the same time that a lot ofthe west All kids were in primary school
too, and they had the Westallcase happened with all the school kids seeing
something that flew over their school.But I excuse me, I M we
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didn't hear about the Westall case whenit happened, because if they suppressed it.
What's very interesting about that case isthe what are the leading Melbourne newspapers
that in those days was called Truth, The Truth newspaper they al had the
topless girl on page two or three, and very popular newspaper with the gambling
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fraternity and all that, but theyhad they had a journalist who was very
interested in the UFO subject. Andthe very week that Westall happened, they
their newspaper article front page had aphoto that one of their own photographers had
taken over Mount dani in All andit was on the front of that paper
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and they said, if anybody hasany UFO stories, contact us and let
us know. And that was theweek that Westall happened, and it was
and it didn't get in. Itwas never mentioned in the Truth newspaper.
I've gone through all of the archiveTruth newspapers for years and news years,
and I can't find any mention ofWorstalls. It was very well covered up.
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Isn't that interesting? Because you know, because that Truth magazine ran for
a very long time and as yousay, didn't have follow UFO stories,
and they did some fairly decent reportingas well. They did a good journalist,
and one of those guys that wasinvolved with truth, I'm pretty sure
was John Pinkney. And he's writtena lot of books about UFOs and stuff
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over the years, and he alsowrote in People Picks magazine and Post magazine.
And I used to read all ofhis reports. I always read them
with great interest. I met himyears later. I met him recently in
the last decade. He died acouple of years ago now, but I
met him before he died, andhe showed me this great, big poster
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photo that somebody made for him ofthis object that's in the front of the
book there that that strange object.He had it blown up huge and yeah,
and it's thanks to him preserving thatimage that we can still find the
image. Because of a lot ofthings have happened, the original negative has
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gone missing. Yeah, so terrible, isn't it that that's gone? After
all was time. Thanks to JohnJohn Pinkney, the original image can be
preserved. So that's good, that'sreliv it. And you're in. You're
in so you so you had theinterest during the child of the bombing years
and then later on you joined view. Well, the UFO subject was an
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interest of mine on and off,and periodically these things come up in the
news and you said, you think, oh, that's an interesting case.
The Knowles case was one that wasvery interesting. Whether the car picked the
family up or the object picked thecar up with the family in it and
then dropped it on the road.Well, when that case happened, the
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subject got into the news a bit, and some gentleman wrote a letter into
the newspaper that got my attention.His name was George Bond and he was
from Sandringham and he wrote into thenewspaper. So I looked up. I
looked up the name Bond, Sandringhamin the in the white pages, and
I found his funder. I ranghim up and he was guy who wrote
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this newspaper article. So I hadto chat to him and he told me
he used to go to the UFOSociety meetings in the city years ago,
and he said, yeah, I'mreally interesting in the subject. I should
start going to those meetings because that'swhere you get all the information about UFO
stuff. So I started going.Because I took his advice, I started
going. That's why I started goingto UFO meetings. And then around yeah,
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well was just around just after thetime that the Knolls case happened.
Yeah, so late eighties. Verysoon I ended up joining the committee after
about just going as a member forabout five years. I used to sometimes
say I've got something really interesting.I want to show to the whole all
the people that are here tonight,And I'd sort of pushed my way on
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stage and show show and use paperarticle or play at tape or something.
Yeah, I've got I've got avery good recording off the radio. And
I played that to everybody, andthe committee saw that I was fairly commit
it. And then they had abig argument and a big falling out with
one of their committee meetees meet members, two or three of them quit on
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the same night. They had abig disagreement about something, and then they
asked me to fill in to takethe place of somebody who had left.
That somebody was a fellow named JohnChatel. He was one of the ones
that had a big argument with themand left. Yeah, and so I
was I sort of went into takehis place in a sense. There was
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a couple other guys left as well. So yeah, I ended up on
the committee. Now you really dolearn about a group or a society.
If you become part of their committee, you do, you do. That's
where you really see what goes on. And it's a good training ground because
later on I ended up running theAustralian the Victorian branch of the Australian UFO
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Research Network. But I just hadeight years of training with U Force Force
before you. Yeah, so thatthat really helped. We'll see what the
trouble with view Force was. Theythey wanted to um, they thought they
were pretty exclusive as a group,and they they didn't want anything to do
with anybody else around Australia. Theyjust wanted to keep themselves secluded. And
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they're cutting themselves off from all theother cases and all the other stories,
and I thought that was a bitsilly. I sort of explained that I'd
like to be in contact with peoplelike Bill Chalker and Keith Basterfield and oh
no, no, no, no, you can't do that. Then,
those they're terrible guys. You know, they'll they'll take your stories and write
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them up as their own and theywon't even give you a mention, you
know. So yeah, well thatdidn't bother me. I just wanted to
be in contact with everybody. Wellthen when Robert Froller's group came along and
it was Australia White. I founda magazine by chance in a bookshop and
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it was one of their first publishedmagazines, which was The Uthologist. I
got their contact details and rang themup and said, do you want a
Victorian and correspondent. They said,yeah, so great. So I wanted
to write about what was happening inVictorian and give it to them and they
would put it in the magazine wouldgo around to Australia. That's great.
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Yeah, well with with view force. If I wrote an article they gave
it to them, they'd reject halfof them and they'd say, oh,
you put somebody's name in the article, so you can't. We can't do
that. We can't put anybody's namein an article. What they were frightened
about being sued. I think,you know, because Paul Woman was an
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American and he probably warned them ifyou use anybody's name, they can sue
you, so they you know,And it was very frusto writing an article
and then to be just to bounce, you know, so I'd have to
rewrite it and take all the namesout or something. But one day I
wrote an article and they rejected it. I sent it to Aupahn, to
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the Upologist magazine. They published it. Yeah, and the next time I
went to a committee meeting, youcould cut the air of a knife.
I'd been a very naughty boy.A magazine were not around Australia as opposed
to the local journal, and theyhad knocked it back and there it was
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published. They were not happy.They lost control of me. So that
was one of the reasons why Iended up getting more involved with Aupahn.
Had a better magazine and a betterphilosophy, a better idea, Let's share
the information all around Australia, let'snot hold it to ourselves. It was
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almost a generational shift, wasn't it. You know, going from the view
Force which had been around since thefifties with a lot of the with a
lot of the same faces for thatperiod of time, and the way they
ran things were very much in anold school kind of kind of the way.
And by the time you get toRobert Froler and a youth for there
more, it was the nineties andmore progressive moving forward. Yeah, it
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was a complete a complete see change, a complete change of attitude, enlightenment,
sharing of information not holding it backmuch better, you know, and
being Australia wide too, they hadthey had a director in every state,
so you'd had different groups everywhere.It was much better idea, and they
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had bigger conference they had big conferencesthey put on and they'd have international guest
speakers from all You could go toa conference and you could beat Travis Walton
and yeah, and you know,I stayed in the same house as Travis
Walton for a weekend and I metGeorge Napp through the same process. Spent
a weekend. I spent a weekendwith George Napp. It was great,
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fantastic got to know Travis Watton reallywell, and and a whole of other
people too, you know, soreally really good organ I was glad that
I had done that because otherwise I'djust be stuck in the same little room
in Brighton with these old people thatdidn't want anything to do with anybody.
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Just really, it's so hard toget your head around that, isn't it,
you know, because because the UFOphenomenon is obviously a worldwide phenomenon,
why wouldn't you want to know allthat information? But it just comes down
to those rival reason you know,that's very unfortunate that anyone who's been around
UFO Field knows there's rival reason peopledon't share information and it's a look very
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competitive at some you know. Soyeah, one of the first committee meetings
I went to, they wanted meto join the committee, and I didn't
want to be on the committee,and they said, well, come along
anyway and just see what it's like. And I went along. That They
tricked me into going, and theysaid, look, if you come to
three meetings in a row, you'rea now member of the committee. So
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I stayed away for a while,and eventually they tricked me into going three
weeks, three times in a row. They had them once a month,
and eventually they got me into theircommittee. And that I saw it as
an opportunity to do some writing,because I'd never done much writing. But
writing reports was interesting to me becauseI'd read a lot of stuff that Bill
Chalker had written, and he'd writtenfor a few magazines. He wrote quite
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interesting stories. And what was interestingabout that was at the first committee meeting
that I actually went to, Iactually mentioned the name Bill Chalker, and
I was almost shouted down for mentioninghis name. Bring that unholy name.
How do you mention that name inthis holy place kind of a thing.
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It was like that, it wasridiculous. That is like the guy it's
it's so hard to believe. Andnow it's a lovely segue in some ways
leading into the fact that after afterafter all this this UFO background that you've
gotten, and you've looked at manymany cases over the years, and one
that's captivated you perhaps the most,is that was the disappearance of Fred Valentice.
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And you've recently, very recently,just completed a book on Fred Valenti.
And the thing that must be saidabout this, it's been decade since
anyone has written a book about Fred, and and i'd like to have just
talked to you about that process.And I'm just going to bring it up
onto the screen so people can seethe new the new book. So it's
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called Nothing on Radar, The ValentiiceMystery George Simpson, available on Amazon.
So and I highly recommend anyone who'swho's followed the Fred valentiic story or interested
in Australian stories in general, tograb yourself a copy of this book.
It really is essential reading if youinto UFOs and particularly intrigued by Fred Lentics.
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It covers a lot of years becauseit's forty four years ago this year
that had happened. Yes, wehad a fourtieth anniversary for him Arabian Airport
on the fortieth lovely and wonderful daythat we had with yourself and Steve Roby,
etc. Etc. I'm just goingto just for those who may not
be familiar, I'm just going topop the picture of Fred again. So
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that's Fred Valentich. He disappeared onthe twenty first of October nineteen seventy eight
while flying his Cessna over Bass Straitand this was the actual plane, so
that is DSJA HDSJ and he disappearedin this area here when he took off
from Araban and he was heading toking Ireland, which is just to the
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northwest of Tasmania. So that's theshort version for anyone who's listening to the
show not familiar with it. Butit was a very big story. Well
why it was so big really wasbecause we have a pilot who's up in
the air flying a plane and describingthis thing that he's seeing from in the
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plane, something flying around him,traveling at speeds that he's never seen before,
and looking like something he's never seenbefore. And you know, he
asks, you know, are thereany military aircraft, because they're the only
things he can think of that couldgo that quick. And he keeps being
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told no, there's no aircraft inyour vicinity, you know, and I
think about three occasions he's trying toascertain how can this thing be doing what
it's doing. At one point hesaid, it's just passed over me a
thousand feet above, at least athousand feet above, and then for a
while completely vanished. And then atone point he says, he seems to
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be playing some sort of a game. M He says, um, well,
it was a game. It wasa cat and mouse game, you
know, and Fred was the mouse. Unfortunately, you know, this thing
was flying rings around him. Heactually said, it's flying over me a
two three times at a time atspeeds I cannot identify. That's an amazing
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Well hang on, try unpacking thatfor a minute. What does that mean?
What can fly over you at twoto three times at once at a
time. It's just completely bizarre.You know. It's a very very strange
description, a very detailed and compactdescription of something very odd going on,
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And of course he's trying to problemsolve this in a in a in a
pilot's way, isn't he like he'she's not up there, um, you
know, talking about at this ina in a in an ordinary civilian ways.
He's addressing this problem that he's got, trying to troubleshoot it with Steve
Roby at Tullamarine on the ground,and and he's trying to compress that those
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sort of statements, isn't he well? And from Steve's point of view,
there's not very much you can dowhen you're talking to somebody over a two
way radio and you're you know,you're holding the microphone in one hand flying
a plane with the other m youknow, and there's not really much Steve
can do it except observe and listenand talk to him. I mean Steve
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can't see anything, of course,it's just all over the air. It's
a radio communication and that's all.Yeah, exactly. So what the book?
What was your aim in so inwriting the book? What was what
were you trying to trying to achieve? And what were you what points were
you trying to make or what newinformation were you were you trying to present
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to a century audience. Well,it's a pretty complicated question to answer.
Fred. My first thing is I'vecome across a lot of websites where they
discuss various websites, especially once withpilots. People in the aviation industry have
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little websites where they all get onand chat about various things. And every
now and then the Valentage case willcome up and they all start talking about,
Oh, yeah, he's the guywho was flying upside down and got
disorientated and crashed into the sea.Okay, well, if that happened,
you crash assess now into the seafrom four and a half thousand feet because
he was just asked what's your actuallevel by Stevens and his answer was four
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thousand and five hundred feet. Youcrash the plane from that hide into the
sea, things break up, youget and you're going to get stuff floating,
and they would have found something.They would have found, yeah,
and even aviation fuel would have leakedfrom the impact, would have the tanks
would have popped or burst or something. There would have been some fluid somewhere
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and aviation fuel floats on the water. They found some diesel fuel, which
turned out to be marine diesel fuel. They don't run aircraft on that stuff
as far as I'm aware. No, So different different, different fuel.
Yeah, and the engines, youknow, have a different everything's different.
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You were sort of trying to getto put the record straight in some ways,
like people were making uninformed, youknow statements. Some of the things
people say about Fred are disgusting,to be quite honesty, They really they
discussed me the things they say abouthim, and they laugh about him and
say that he was an incompetent foolwho wanted to see a u FO.
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Nothing could be further from the truth. He had seen he had had a
UFO siding, and he'd also seenUFO records that were held at the Air
Force base when he was an aircadet. UM they had they thought he
was so good at and so enthusiasticabout flying. They wanted him to become
(25:18):
a trainer so he could train otherpeople to fly. But he didn't get
into the Air Force, so thatnever happened. So that's why he pursued
a career in um commercial aviation becausehe couldn't get into the Air Force.
The Air Force on he take thetop um, top two or three percent
of the population. You've got tohave an IQ of about six thousand,
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you know, to get into theair Force's Fred's the beans. Fred was
clever enough, but not clever enough, not that high level. You know
how anyone in the population has thathigh level of you know, of of
academic proficiency. You know, it'sa very very very elite group of people
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that it get to fly our fighterjets. But he was good at being
a pilot. He was good,He was good competent um, he was
able to competently control an aircraft.His girlfriend went up with him a few
times, Ronda, and only youknow, Ronda, you better. She
said that he sometimes flew acrobatics whenshe was in the plane. Well she
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trying to make a throw up orsomething. Well, I mean, yeah,
how acrobatic. Can you get anassessment? Imagine doing a loop the
loop or something, you know,Yes, no, that's that's what Fred
was doing, just showing off.He could, you know, he could
fly the plane. He knew whathe was doing. I think any other
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pilot that was in his situation atthat time, at that time, at
that place would have encountered the sameabsolutely, And when you read the transcript
or pay close attention to it,you can see that this is a pilot
who is trouble shooting this particular problemthat he's got, and it's a very
(27:10):
unique problem. He's trying to identifyit. He can't identify. They ask
Steve Robi asks him, can youidentify the aircraft? And he says,
he says, he says no.He says that all I can tell you
is that it's a long shape.As it goes past, I can't tell
you more than that it's got suchspeed. So as it goes past,
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it's a long shape and it hassuch speed. At one point he said,
it looks like landing lights. Oh, they've had a mistake, I
think in the transcription too. Veryearly on when he says, is there
any known aircraft below five thousand rightat the beginning, and Steve says no
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known aircraft and then says, Ihave seems to be a large aircraft blow
five thousand. But the transcript theyheard that wrong, they said, they
said the friends said I am,I am, seems to be a large
(28:14):
aircraft below five thousand. Didn't makesense. He actually says, I have
what seems to I have seems tobe a large aircraft. So I've written
that in the book. I've triedto make it a more accurate transcript.
But also something that was pointed outby Dick Haynes when he was out here.
Doctor Richard Haynes from NASSA wrote abook very early on about this case
(28:36):
too, called Melbourne Episode. TheCase Study of Missing Pilot was a very
disappointing book to read. It wasa very very dry read and very disappointing.
And I couldn't remember everybody who wasgetting behind and saying, oh,
this is very exciting and then we'llwe all ready, but we were going
what this going on about? Hemade up four different made up stories of
(28:57):
what might have happened to Fred otherthan him having an encounter with what he
described just complete waste of time,you know. But I do use that
book as a reference because it hadthe tradescript in it, even though it
was inaccurate, and they mixed thepages up as well, so complete mix
up, unfortunately. But that bookcame out in ninety two, I think
(29:22):
or something, and it's out ofprint. There's another book that came out
called The Devil's Meridian, which hasa lot about a lot about the Valentiage
case in that a lot of detailabout other things going on around the time
too. Very very good reference,very good reference book, that one,
But that's not in print anymore.That was done by a couple of journalists
from Sydney, I think, yeah, and that up until your book has
(29:48):
probably been the best one for ageneral reader to look at and get a
good handle on it. And nowyou've sort of brought that into the twenty
first century for a new I'm hopingto that. Devil's Regim was by Killian
Leicster. Yeah, it came outin nineteen eighty Yeah, so many years.
(30:12):
It's been out of print for manyyears. And let's see, Richard
Haynes's book came out in nineteen eightynine, so it's been a long time
since we had fresh eyes on it. Yeah. Well, also I wanted
to I got permission to use thatphotograph, the roy Manifold photo on the
(30:32):
front cover, well, to useit at all in the book, but
I decided to put it on thefront cover because I think it's such a
stunning photograph. That photo the RoydManifold took because he wasn't aware that there
was anything there when he took thatshot. For those are looking at his
watch, yeah, he wasn't.For those who weren't familiar with that,
that was the series of photographs thatwere taken um near Cape Otway by a
(30:57):
plumber who was on holiday at thesame time that Fred flew flew over a
very similar time to that. Sothose photos were sent away to America for
analysis and they were There was alot of scrutiny put onto those pictures because
it really does tie and adds alot of weight to what Fred was reporting.
(31:17):
Yeah, well it's a very oddobject too. He took a series
of six photographs pictures, Yeah,and it was only the fifth one that
had this unusual object in it.Mum. I think the fourth photo had
a disturbance in the water. Itlooked like there was, but the sea
(31:38):
was nearly flat. I'll just bakeup again on the screen. I've just
brought the book cover back up andyeah, so for people who are who
are looking, you'll see that thisis the photo that George is talking about
on the cover of Nothing on Radar. So that object there, and I've
had it on this show in previousepisode as well, when I did an
episode on Fred valentis previously, soyou can see this is the object that
(32:00):
Fred's talking about that was taken byRoy on the and that's the very night
that Fred disappeared, so you cansee it was a beautiful evening. And
the object you've got the sort ofthe top it's like a spinning top sort
of a shape, and the andthe sort of the the energy coming off
to the left and the cloud tothe right. So it's a it's an
(32:21):
amazing, amazing picture. It is. What it trigged me by, it
is the little an area next tothe object is like a blue sparkly area
in the sky. It's not inthe previous photos or the one after.
Just in this photo, just aroundthis object, there's a field of like
blue sparkles and the camera has pickedit up. Yeah. And what's interesting
(32:47):
about that is we had a ladywhen when my daughter was going to either
kindergarten or pre kinder there's kindergarten inthe very next street to us, and
there was That was the other timeI started going to the committee or becoming
(33:08):
a member of the committee, andmy wife had mentioned for some reason that
I was she thought I was goingto miss some event that was significant in
the life of our little daughter wasgrowing up, because I was going to
go to this darn committee meeting andthey said what committee is that, and
(33:29):
then she said the UFO Research Committee, and this lady just started laughing,
said, Ah, that's that's awhole lot of bunkum that stuff, it's
a lot of rubbish. A coupleof weeks later, she was standing at
my front door, excited like crazy, jumping out of a skin, jumping
up and down on the spot,wanting to tell me about a UFO sighting.
She had just had so gone froma complete skeptic to seeing one.
(33:54):
And the one that she saw flewright over her house. She could see
it. She was washing the dishes, standing at the kitchen window looking out
on the horizon. There was abig, bright light coming towards the getting
bigger and bigger and bigger, andshe said to her husband, Hey,
come and look at this, Comeand look at this, and he wasn't
(34:15):
interested, and she was just aboutscreaming by the time it was got bigger
and bigger. They both ran intothe backyard to watch this thing go over,
and it was so big it waslike the size of a football field.
It marked the whole sky out asit went over, and it was
silent. They had a big rowof lights along the front edge of it.
(34:37):
And she said this, She wasinterested in this big object that went
over there. Where we live here, the beach goes right there's a beach
side suburb. There's a whole rowof suburbs, and we've got the bay
Port fill of bay right there,so all the beaches are down there now.
The planes from Rabbit Airport fly upand down along the beach. It's
(35:00):
a good for them because if somethinggoes wrong, they could land on the
beach without hitting houses and stuff.Well, this thing was going along the
same way where all the planes go, and it went right over her place
and went right over here. AndI wasn't home, so I didn't see
anything. But what she said wasshe could see a plane going along near
(35:22):
the beach, and she could hearthe plane down over It's about half a
kilometer from her house, but youcan hear the planes as they go along.
This huge thing blocked the whole skyout when above her, made no
sound, and it wasn't a balloon. It was like the size of a
football field and silent, but whather husband was really interested in. It
(35:49):
was not only that this big objectwas flying along silently, but there was
on one side of it there wasa big field of bright blue sparkling in
there. Wow, so this iscoming back to similar to what we see
on the row manifold photo. That'swhat you can see in the manifold photo.
Yeah. Yeah, so when youso so listeners, when you go
(36:14):
out and peaches George's book, havea really good look at that cover photo
and you'll see quite clearly what he'stalking about with that blue sparkle coming off
the coming off the object. That'sit's really good to see a similar a
similar story like that. Now withthe disappearance, there's the theories have raged
over the years, haven't they,George, about about what happened. There's
(36:36):
the theories that he went into aspiral, ended up in the ocean,
that he was flying upside down,that he crashed and he flew off to
South Australia somewhere. There's you knowthat he was, that he was running
drugs everything under the stun. Peoplesaw him in Argentina, like there was
all these stories that came out aboutFred. Yeah. One in connection was
one that you received several years agowas about armor in South Australia. Would
(37:01):
you like to tell that for alittle for a little while, right,
okay, okay, Well that thatis a more recent development. Yes.
What happened was there was a lotof UFO sightings happening in New South Wales,
in central New South Wales and aroundKunebara Brand and Bill Chalker was investigating
(37:22):
them all and he went and visiteda lot of people that were spoke a
lot of witnesses and a lot ofthem said, oh, you've got to
go and talk to this guy calledLorrie. Right, this bloke called Lorrie
ran the local hardware store in KunebaraBrand and several of them, so you've
got to go and talk to him. What he was doing was he would
(37:45):
talk to all of his customers andask any of them if they'd ever had
anything any unusual sightings or experiences ofany type, and when they when they
said down they had, he wouldwrite it all down. He was documented
basically all the UFO sightings. Andthe funny thing is that is a it's
(38:07):
a bit like Wickliffe Wells Brand,like a very very hot Australian hot spot
for UFO sides UFO activity, andthere's a lot of telescopes up there.
You know that there's a lot oftelescopes in the area. Now, I
haven't actually been to Gooding a baronbrand myself, but there's a lot of
a lot of skywatching going on upthere, and a lot of stuff comes
(38:30):
from there, a lot of reportscome from there. So anyway, Bill
was out there talking to this people. He chased up this guy called Laurie.
His name was Laurie Rider. Nowhe he got really up in arms
when John Howard tried to get everybody'sguns handed in, remember after the shooting
(38:51):
down in Tasmania, Yes, soumaround that time. Laurie was very upset
because he was on the side ofall the farmers. All the farmers,
he said, needed to be ableto keep their guns because they need them
on the land, you know.So so he's well known in the community
up there for that sort of stuff. I'm making a stand against the government
(39:16):
and that's fair enough, I guess. But he claimed that he documented all
these ufocuses and he said the mostinteresting one of the lot was when his
farmer from South Australia came in.He'd moved up there and he came into
the shop one day and so Laurieasked the farmer. We never got the
(39:38):
guy's name, by the way,but Laurie asked his farmer, you know,
what's the strangest thing that you've everseen? And the farmer said,
well, there was there was aguy. He said, I was.
I was harvesting lucern, which theyused for crop feed down in South Australia
(40:00):
on the river in a sort ofarea somewhere around between say Keith and murray
Bridge, somewhere down that way.And he said it was farming, and
there was this very unusual noise thatstarted up, and he thought there was
something wrong with his equipments, farmequipment, so he uncoupled it because all
runs off the tractor's motor, butthat you can uncouple the equipment, which
(40:23):
he did, and he went tothe back to see what's gone wrong,
maybe a bearing or something, butthe noise continued. The equipment was stationary
and not moving, but he wasstill getting the noise. So he's trying
to figure out, hang on,what's this song hearing And then he looked
up and then he saw this largeflying discs is hovering above him, and
(40:50):
he checked it out very closely,because, as as Laurie described, a
lot of these farmers actually are pilots. They do a lot of crop dusting
on their properties. So they flytheir own little planes around and they they
do their own crop dusting. It'spart of being a farmer, I guess.
And they have airstrips at the endof their property. And so he
(41:17):
expected this object to have to maintaina virtual a certain amount of speed to
stay airborne. He said, thiswasn't going fast enough. He thought it
was going to drop. So heran. He ran, He left his
track and just ran away to getclear of this big round object. It's
(41:37):
just in case it fell down,because he couldn't see any reason for it
to be supported. And he saidthere was. It had like an outer
band, two outer bands that werecounter rotational on the outer each of this
thing. And he said, butone band was going very quickly, the
other one was not going very fastat all. And they were a little
(42:00):
spurts of flame coming out of oneend of this object. He thought this,
and it was making horrible screeching noise. They thought, there's something wrong
with his thing. And so that'swhy he ran away. But then from
when he got away from it andlooked back, then he said he could
see that it had a dome ontop, so it was a round object
(42:21):
from underneath, but had a domeon top. And he said it looked
like it had an archway door likea church store on the side of the
dome. He said there were nohandles and no windows or anything. And
then he said as it sort ofrotated as it hovered there, something came
into view and he said it wasan Assessna aircraft was kind of stuck or
(42:45):
attached to the side of this object, just sitting there. That's an amazing
and he couldn't work it out.He said that there were no chains or
hopes or anything holding it up,but there was oil running down. He
thought there was oil running down theoutside of the cessna um And I when
(43:09):
I imagine it, you know,this description, it was a very clear
description. It reminds me of,you know, like saying, how insects
get stuck to the front of acar or a truck, you know,
or all over the bumper, youknow, get things stuck on it.
It just seems to me to besomething like that. They've they've come together,
(43:30):
there's been an aerial collision. Nowif this and he said there was
a registration number on the wing,he could read the registration number of the
plane on the wing. And he'sread that and he's written it down.
He's scratched it into the tractor's paintwork with a nail, so he wouldn't
(43:50):
forget. He didn't have a penand paper on him, being a farmer.
Nail scratched it into the tractor.There's got to be a tractor out
there somewhere with vhds J scratch didn'tdo it. I'd love to find it,
but we don't know a farmer's name. We don't know his name,
so we can't find it. Butyou did. You did make some significant
(44:15):
attempts to try though, didn't you. Look. Yeah, I just about
went broke making funk calls talking tofarmers in the New South Wales area.
I managed to find the name ofa guy. A number of people that
I spoke to. I was askinghim, do you know, do you
remember somebody who moved here from SouthAustralia And they all come up with this
(44:36):
same guy's name. And I trackedhim down and I got his number.
I phoned him and spoke to him, and he didn't know anything about what
I must have sound like a reallunatic to him, you know. And
he had an unusual name. Hewas known as Church First Church Church Mason
was his name. Yeah, andI think he's still alive anyway. Look,
(45:00):
I've I made a model to tryto illustrate what that would have looked
like for the farmer, And it'sin the book. And here's this photo
that I made. Oh, yes, you can see that. Yeah,
the plane. Could you see that, the planet stuck with the side hang
(45:21):
on, Yes, like that,it's just perfect there. Yeah, and
you can see the ground is downthere with the trees are Yeah, there's
this thing up above and there's aplane stuck to it and you can read
the registration number on the wing.Yeah. That's just a little model that
I I mocked that up, justjust a will straight what I imagined when
(45:44):
I was hearing the tape this farmertelling the story. That that's how how
it appeared to me in my mind. And that could be completely wrong for
that, but it's it's what whatthe guy described. This Fred disappeared was
all it was. It was veryclose it was the Sunday morning, fredchisoned
(46:04):
on the Saturday, Saturday evening.Yeah, this was on the Sunday morning,
but in Adelaide. Yeah yeah,so right place, right time.
So well that's sort of there couldhave been anywhere in Australia, I guess.
But it was the next day,the next morning, and the farmer
said that he watched the thing flyaway and it was still making screeching noise
(46:29):
as it flew away. Now,I also got I wrote about that and
put it in the Uthologists magazine,and I've got various people emailed me who'd
read the magazine article and contacted meto tell me that they had similar stories.
One was a guy who's a wasa cameraman working for Channel two in
Adelaide. He said, when hewas five or six years old, he
(46:52):
and his brother got woken up inthe early hours of the morning. And
it was nineteen seventy eight eight,so when he was five sea and they
woke up, so he had afunny rumbling noise and they looked out the
window and there was this big circularobject hovering over their house and the house
across the road at the same time. It was big and it woke them
(47:13):
up, but they didn't see anaeroplane stuck to the side of it.
But it was around the same timeand this thing was making a funny noise
and it woke them up. Channelseven Comeraman So I wrote about that in
the book too. That's the excellentSo we've got some So the whole farmer
angle was was sort of you know, it really sort of adds another strange
(47:37):
to mention to to what potentially happenedif Fred um, So, what are
your thoughts, what do you thinkhappened to him? What's your take on
it? Look, the funny thingis when it comes to the US subject,
anything's possible and nothing's too strange ortoo bizarre. You know, you
(47:59):
hear you've heard about alien abductions andthings like that, and they're doing genetic
experiments on humans and all this sortof stuff. All of that's pretty weird
too. There's nothing that's that strange. It couldn't be true. But for
some people. When Bill first heardthis story and had he was recording,
I've got the tape recording of thethe guy from Colne Barbrand telling the story
(48:24):
that what the farmer told him.We have that on tape. It's a
fairly good recording and I've transcribed thattape and that's in the book here as
well, so you can read whatLaurie said. He described his band alternate,
these bands spinning around, and howthe thing, how he scratched it
(48:45):
with the tractor with the bar reggionumber. So it's nothing that bizarre,
really, I mean, it's itsort of explains why there was no wreckage
found if there was an aerial collision. And on the documentary that we did
with the Science Channel, when whenDick Haynes played the tape of that seventeen
(49:08):
seconds of that metallic noise and hewas saying that could be the sound of
these two objects coming together. WhenBill saw that, that reminded him of
this farmer saying that he saw thesessions stuck to the side of the thing.
It all seemed to make sense.Now to some people that doesn't make
any sense, but it's no lesssensical than any other UFA's story. Well,
(49:32):
you know, the facts are yeah, exactly one hundred percent, and
the fact that you know he wascircul he was he was traveling at four
and a half thousand feet and ifhe had he would have broken up in
the water, and they've searched forhim very quickly in the weeks afterwards as
well, um with pc orians andstuff. So you would have thought they
would have found some wreckage if heended up into Bass Strait. So you
(49:54):
know, given that metallic sound andthis other story that's come about, it's
it's certainly at another dimension to it. Yeah. Yeah, So we're sort
of leaping forwards step by step,very small baby steps, though it's not
really the leap. We're going forwardvery slowly because it's very hard. Hopefully
(50:17):
this book might help to cement theidea in people's minds that there could have
been an aerial collision. Fred probablydidn't end up in the sea. The
plane probably did not disappear in thesea. We've had people that tell us
that divers have found aircraft at thebottom of the sea near capey Way,
and that they had the same registrationnumber as Fred's plane. But you've been
(50:42):
people have been able to fake photosin laboratories for a hundred years. Photography
has been within a hundred years.I've never seen those photographs that were taken
by those divers. They were apparentlypublished, but I've never seen them and
the story abot. Some divers foundsome planes under the sea, and one
(51:02):
of them was Fred's plane and thedoor was Ajar. There was no human
remains in the plane. M ButI've never seen those photos. There's no
evidence, there is no evidence thatthe plane was ever found at the bottom
of the sea. No, thereis no evidence. Only the cowling that
was that was washed up on Flinder'sIsland many years later, like you know,
(51:23):
and that's five years later, fiveyears later, and it was not
not conclusively proven to be a partof his plane or that was from the
same it was the same type ofplane. The serial number didn't didn't match.
It was found only a couple ofhundred meters from the runway of that
of that of that island. Andit is a part that's known to disappear
(51:47):
m every now, and they're onthe planes they when they serviced to plane,
their photo of the air that airintakes disappeared. It's only held in
it by a couple of rivets.And it's it's not a crucial part of
the airplane. It comes to driftand rattles off and flies away and gets
lost. The plane can still flyand operate normally. Yeah, it's not
(52:09):
going to bring it out of thesky. It's like losing a rear vision
mirror or something. You can stilldrive your car. You're not going to
crash because you lost your rear visionmirror. It's something like that. It's
akin to that. It's not thatimportant. But but in the match,
yeah, the numbers, the registeror the serial number of the parts did
(52:30):
not match that of the missing aircraft. So and oh the other thing is
what's convenient about it. It wasfound a m Flinders Island, near the
airport on Flinders Island and where regishippiedwas on near King Island, heading towards
King Island. I'll just bring thatmap back up there. So, yeah,
(52:52):
King Islands to the right. Yeah, Flinders is on the right there.
Now there's about a three hundred kilometergap between those islands. I guess
which direction the water current flows theother way? Yeah, so we would
have to flow against the current forfive years, for four or five years
(53:13):
against the current to get to Flinder'sIsland if it came from where Fred was.
Yes, that's really that's a bitof a stretch. You know,
I personally believe that's a stretch aswell. Um, and hopefully, you
know, perhaps with the release ofthis of the new book, maybe some
new information might come to light aswell. Well. I would like to
(53:37):
know who the farmer was. Somebodymust know who the farmer was. He
must have spoken to somebody about it, because it's that ridicule factor, you
see. People don't they'll say,oh, look, I saw you a
foe. I'll tell you all aboutit, but you can't use my name.
Don't use my name because that thathappened, You know that Kibble,
(53:57):
You know that James Kibble. Yes, that was his attitude for years.
He let them have his photo.He reported what he saw and that he
took the photo. That's a veryinteresting object in that photo that he took
that side on. Yeah, Georgetold about the ball one photo that was
taken on April nineteen sixty six.Yeah, just a few days before Westall
(54:21):
happened. Yea, and only it'slike less than twenty k's from Westall.
Right, And you can't deny afterall these years that there must be some
connection between the two. Oh,you know, there must be some connection,
no question. But Kibble did nothave his name associated with that photo
(54:43):
for about thirty or forty years.It was only in the last few years
that he owned up that it washim and he took the photo. And
that's because of this ridicule thing.Now now that he's retired. You know,
he didn't have the he didn't thinkit was going to be any harm
done having his name associated with it. But you know, he took that
photo and he nearly broke his nosewith the camera when he pulled it up
(55:06):
quickly to his face to take theshot. Camera, he nearly he banged
himself of the nose with the camera. He nearly broke Oh wow, Well,
we're actually lucky to get that incrediblephoto. We're actually out of time.
We've come to the end of theepisode, which is we could talk
for another two hours about this,so I just want to bring the backup.
(55:30):
So this is George's book, Nothingon Radar, The Valentiche Mystery,
available on Amazon now, so besure to get on and an audio copy.
And hopefully we've given you a nicelittle teaser about the contents. And
George, thank you so much forjoining me tonight on this episode. And
(55:50):
you know, we look forward toseeing I'm record you're reading the book,
and I'm sure other people are goingto really look forward to getting an updated,
um, you know, a versionof what's happened in you know,
into the twenty first century. Sothank you very much for joining me tonight.
It's been it's been my pleasure,Ben. It's always nice talking to
(56:12):
you. And yeah, I hopeeverybody don't just buy one copy of the
book by two give one to yourbest friend. Yeah idea, that's a
that's a wonderful idea. So andI'll get George and one again in the
future too, so we can wecan do another follow up. But thanks
again, George, good on you, Ben. Thanks very much for having
me over, Bro,
Okay. Australia, the sixth largestcountry on Earth, an ancient, rugged,
(00:40):
and unforgiving land with abundant animal life, both beautiful and deadly. Found
within its all inspiring landscapes and naturalbeauty. Exists a d history of unexplained
(01:03):
mysteries for anyone with the courage toinvestigate them. Tonight we joined Ben on
a journey across this vast island continentin search of answers to events that have
reshaped the lives of so many thathave been exposed to Unexplained Phenomena Australia with
(01:32):
your host Ben Hurled. Get everyone, and welcome to another episode of Unexplained
Phenomena Australia. And it is absolutelyfantastic to have my first live interview on
(01:57):
this show. After about we're upto about twenty episodes now. It gives
me great pleasure to welcome long timeAustralian UFO researcher and good friend George Simpson
to the show. Welcome George.Yeah, good to see you then.
Yeah, fantastic to see you too. And I just wanted to sort of
(02:19):
just quickly start off by just talkingbriefly about how I actually met you in
the first place. So I hadbeen back in the mid two thousands,
I'd been reading the Ufologist magazine andyou had your regular featuring there and yeah,
(02:39):
and I had seen that you werein Victoria, and I reached out
to you and I said that Iwas interested in being involved in in UFO
research. And at that time,you were holding meetings in Chelsea, and
I came down and I came toprobably about two or three of those meetings,
and I met you first of allthrough the meetings that you were held
(03:02):
in Chelsea. And that would bearound about twenty ten sometime, so okay,
right, yeah, so that wasthat was when I first met you.
And but you've been around the UFOscene for a very very long time,
and I just wanted to maybe ifyou could give us a little bit
(03:22):
of background on when the interest startednew and your journey through what you've done
in the UFO veled up until today. Well, really it was because of
watching television when I was a kidum science fiction. Really I never got
into Star Trek in any sense atall, but years before Star Trek came
(03:46):
on, there was a TV sciencefiction show called The Outer Limits, and
that there was a different alien onTV. Every week and so and we
all collected the Bubblegum cards and watchedall these TV shows. You know,
there's arguments at home with most sistersbecause I wanted to watch that show every
(04:10):
week and they wanted to watch somethingelse. And there was only one TV
and the TV was black and whitetoo, so I got to see every
second episode that came on air.But they had these sci fi stories and
they had a different alien every week, so that really intrigued me. And
(04:30):
you know, that was in theearly days of the space race. It
was pre Apollo, so they hadthe Gemini spacecraft. Then those little Gemini
spacecrafts were going into orbit and stuffwith people in them, the little tin
can you know that David Bowie issinging about, I'm up in this tin
can. They were the Gemini things, I think, and then with Apolo
(04:55):
Apolo, everything got more sophisticated andbefore we knew it, they'll get they
were going to go to the Moon. So there was a book at school
that I read. They made usread books at school. They taught us
how to read, and then theymade us read them. You had to
pick a book out of the libraryand read it. And I found one
called Flying Sources, Where Do TheyCome From? Right by an Australian author
(05:19):
called Richard Tambling. Yes, andI saw that in the library, so
I borrowed that and I read thatand it's really I think it's the first
book I've actually read, you know, the first book I read all the
way through and it was all aboutall these different UFO sightings all over Australia,
(05:39):
and I was hooked from then on. But there was also stories of
uphone encounters and things that were goingon around that time as well. You
know, over during those years,there was all kinds of cases happening,
Yeah, and they were being reportedin the news and so they always stood
out in my mind, you know, all these from things that were going
(06:00):
on. I remember the Tully,the Tully Source and nests being in the
news. Yes, that was aroundthe time in my childhood, you know,
when I was in primary school,and I was in primary school at
the same time that a lot ofthe west All kids were in primary school
too, and they had the Westallcase happened with all the school kids seeing
something that flew over their school.But I excuse me, I M we
(06:28):
didn't hear about the Westall case whenit happened, because if they suppressed it.
What's very interesting about that case isthe what are the leading Melbourne newspapers
that in those days was called Truth, The Truth newspaper they al had the
topless girl on page two or three, and very popular newspaper with the gambling
(06:55):
fraternity and all that, but theyhad they had a journalist who was very
interested in the UFO subject. Andthe very week that Westall happened, they
their newspaper article front page had aphoto that one of their own photographers had
taken over Mount dani in All andit was on the front of that paper
(07:16):
and they said, if anybody hasany UFO stories, contact us and let
us know. And that was theweek that Westall happened, and it was
and it didn't get in. Itwas never mentioned in the Truth newspaper.
I've gone through all of the archiveTruth newspapers for years and news years,
and I can't find any mention ofWorstalls. It was very well covered up.
(07:39):
Isn't that interesting? Because you know, because that Truth magazine ran for
a very long time and as yousay, didn't have follow UFO stories,
and they did some fairly decent reportingas well. They did a good journalist,
and one of those guys that wasinvolved with truth, I'm pretty sure
was John Pinkney. And he's writtena lot of books about UFOs and stuff
(08:01):
over the years, and he alsowrote in People Picks magazine and Post magazine.
And I used to read all ofhis reports. I always read them
with great interest. I met himyears later. I met him recently in
the last decade. He died acouple of years ago now, but I
met him before he died, andhe showed me this great, big poster
(08:26):
photo that somebody made for him ofthis object that's in the front of the
book there that that strange object.He had it blown up huge and yeah,
and it's thanks to him preserving thatimage that we can still find the
image. Because of a lot ofthings have happened, the original negative has
(08:46):
gone missing. Yeah, so terrible, isn't it that that's gone? After
all was time. Thanks to JohnJohn Pinkney, the original image can be
preserved. So that's good, that'sreliv it. And you're in. You're
in so you so you had theinterest during the child of the bombing years
and then later on you joined view. Well, the UFO subject was an
(09:13):
interest of mine on and off,and periodically these things come up in the
news and you said, you think, oh, that's an interesting case.
The Knowles case was one that wasvery interesting. Whether the car picked the
family up or the object picked thecar up with the family in it and
then dropped it on the road.Well, when that case happened, the
(09:37):
subject got into the news a bit, and some gentleman wrote a letter into
the newspaper that got my attention.His name was George Bond and he was
from Sandringham and he wrote into thenewspaper. So I looked up. I
looked up the name Bond, Sandringhamin the in the white pages, and
I found his funder. I ranghim up and he was guy who wrote
(10:00):
this newspaper article. So I hadto chat to him and he told me
he used to go to the UFOSociety meetings in the city years ago,
and he said, yeah, I'mreally interesting in the subject. I should
start going to those meetings because that'swhere you get all the information about UFO
stuff. So I started going.Because I took his advice, I started
going. That's why I started goingto UFO meetings. And then around yeah,
(10:26):
well was just around just after thetime that the Knolls case happened.
Yeah, so late eighties. Verysoon I ended up joining the committee after
about just going as a member forabout five years. I used to sometimes
say I've got something really interesting.I want to show to the whole all
the people that are here tonight,And I'd sort of pushed my way on
(10:46):
stage and show show and use paperarticle or play at tape or something.
Yeah, I've got I've got avery good recording off the radio. And
I played that to everybody, andthe committee saw that I was fairly commit
it. And then they had abig argument and a big falling out with
one of their committee meetees meet members, two or three of them quit on
(11:07):
the same night. They had abig disagreement about something, and then they
asked me to fill in to takethe place of somebody who had left.
That somebody was a fellow named JohnChatel. He was one of the ones
that had a big argument with themand left. Yeah, and so I
was I sort of went into takehis place in a sense. There was
(11:31):
a couple other guys left as well. So yeah, I ended up on
the committee. Now you really dolearn about a group or a society.
If you become part of their committee, you do, you do. That's
where you really see what goes on. And it's a good training ground because
later on I ended up running theAustralian the Victorian branch of the Australian UFO
(11:54):
Research Network. But I just hadeight years of training with U Force Force
before you. Yeah, so thatthat really helped. We'll see what the
trouble with view Force was. Theythey wanted to um, they thought they
were pretty exclusive as a group,and they they didn't want anything to do
with anybody else around Australia. Theyjust wanted to keep themselves secluded. And
(12:18):
they're cutting themselves off from all theother cases and all the other stories,
and I thought that was a bitsilly. I sort of explained that I'd
like to be in contact with peoplelike Bill Chalker and Keith Basterfield and oh
no, no, no, no, you can't do that. Then,
those they're terrible guys. You know, they'll they'll take your stories and write
(12:39):
them up as their own and theywon't even give you a mention, you
know. So yeah, well thatdidn't bother me. I just wanted to
be in contact with everybody. Wellthen when Robert Froller's group came along and
it was Australia White. I founda magazine by chance in a bookshop and
(13:03):
it was one of their first publishedmagazines, which was The Uthologist. I
got their contact details and rang themup and said, do you want a
Victorian and correspondent. They said,yeah, so great. So I wanted
to write about what was happening inVictorian and give it to them and they
would put it in the magazine wouldgo around to Australia. That's great.
(13:28):
Yeah, well with with view force. If I wrote an article they gave
it to them, they'd reject halfof them and they'd say, oh,
you put somebody's name in the article, so you can't. We can't do
that. We can't put anybody's namein an article. What they were frightened
about being sued. I think,you know, because Paul Woman was an
(13:50):
American and he probably warned them ifyou use anybody's name, they can sue
you, so they you know,And it was very frusto writing an article
and then to be just to bounce, you know, so I'd have to
rewrite it and take all the namesout or something. But one day I
wrote an article and they rejected it. I sent it to Aupahn, to
(14:13):
the Upologist magazine. They published it. Yeah, and the next time I
went to a committee meeting, youcould cut the air of a knife.
I'd been a very naughty boy.A magazine were not around Australia as opposed
to the local journal, and theyhad knocked it back and there it was
(14:37):
published. They were not happy.They lost control of me. So that
was one of the reasons why Iended up getting more involved with Aupahn.
Had a better magazine and a betterphilosophy, a better idea, Let's share
the information all around Australia, let'snot hold it to ourselves. It was
(14:58):
almost a generational shift, wasn't it. You know, going from the view
Force which had been around since thefifties with a lot of the with a
lot of the same faces for thatperiod of time, and the way they
ran things were very much in anold school kind of kind of the way.
And by the time you get toRobert Froler and a youth for there
more, it was the nineties andmore progressive moving forward. Yeah, it
(15:22):
was a complete a complete see change, a complete change of attitude, enlightenment,
sharing of information not holding it backmuch better, you know, and
being Australia wide too, they hadthey had a director in every state,
so you'd had different groups everywhere.It was much better idea, and they
(15:43):
had bigger conference they had big conferencesthey put on and they'd have international guest
speakers from all You could go toa conference and you could beat Travis Walton
and yeah, and you know,I stayed in the same house as Travis
Walton for a weekend and I metGeorge Napp through the same process. Spent
a weekend. I spent a weekendwith George Napp. It was great,
(16:07):
fantastic got to know Travis Watton reallywell, and and a whole of other
people too, you know, soreally really good organ I was glad that
I had done that because otherwise I'djust be stuck in the same little room
in Brighton with these old people thatdidn't want anything to do with anybody.
(16:30):
Just really, it's so hard toget your head around that, isn't it,
you know, because because the UFOphenomenon is obviously a worldwide phenomenon,
why wouldn't you want to know allthat information? But it just comes down
to those rival reason you know,that's very unfortunate that anyone who's been around
UFO Field knows there's rival reason peopledon't share information and it's a look very
(16:51):
competitive at some you know. Soyeah, one of the first committee meetings
I went to, they wanted meto join the committee, and I didn't
want to be on the committee,and they said, well, come along
anyway and just see what it's like. And I went along. That They
tricked me into going, and theysaid, look, if you come to
three meetings in a row, you'rea now member of the committee. So
(17:15):
I stayed away for a while,and eventually they tricked me into going three
weeks, three times in a row. They had them once a month,
and eventually they got me into theircommittee. And that I saw it as
an opportunity to do some writing,because I'd never done much writing. But
writing reports was interesting to me becauseI'd read a lot of stuff that Bill
Chalker had written, and he'd writtenfor a few magazines. He wrote quite
(17:38):
interesting stories. And what was interestingabout that was at the first committee meeting
that I actually went to, Iactually mentioned the name Bill Chalker, and
I was almost shouted down for mentioninghis name. Bring that unholy name.
How do you mention that name inthis holy place kind of a thing.
(18:00):
It was like that, it wasridiculous. That is like the guy it's
it's so hard to believe. Andnow it's a lovely segue in some ways
leading into the fact that after afterafter all this this UFO background that you've
gotten, and you've looked at manymany cases over the years, and one
that's captivated you perhaps the most,is that was the disappearance of Fred Valentice.
(18:23):
And you've recently, very recently,just completed a book on Fred Valenti.
And the thing that must be saidabout this, it's been decade since
anyone has written a book about Fred, and and i'd like to have just
talked to you about that process.And I'm just going to bring it up
onto the screen so people can seethe new the new book. So it's
(18:45):
called Nothing on Radar, The ValentiiceMystery George Simpson, available on Amazon.
So and I highly recommend anyone who'swho's followed the Fred valentiic story or interested
in Australian stories in general, tograb yourself a copy of this book.
It really is essential reading if youinto UFOs and particularly intrigued by Fred Lentics.
(19:11):
It covers a lot of years becauseit's forty four years ago this year
that had happened. Yes, wehad a fourtieth anniversary for him Arabian Airport
on the fortieth lovely and wonderful daythat we had with yourself and Steve Roby,
etc. Etc. I'm just goingto just for those who may not
be familiar, I'm just going topop the picture of Fred again. So
(19:33):
that's Fred Valentich. He disappeared onthe twenty first of October nineteen seventy eight
while flying his Cessna over Bass Straitand this was the actual plane, so
that is DSJA HDSJ and he disappearedin this area here when he took off
from Araban and he was heading toking Ireland, which is just to the
(19:53):
northwest of Tasmania. So that's theshort version for anyone who's listening to the
show not familiar with it. Butit was a very big story. Well
why it was so big really wasbecause we have a pilot who's up in
the air flying a plane and describingthis thing that he's seeing from in the
(20:17):
plane, something flying around him,traveling at speeds that he's never seen before,
and looking like something he's never seenbefore. And you know, he
asks, you know, are thereany military aircraft, because they're the only
things he can think of that couldgo that quick. And he keeps being
(20:40):
told no, there's no aircraft inyour vicinity, you know, and I
think about three occasions he's trying toascertain how can this thing be doing what
it's doing. At one point hesaid, it's just passed over me a
thousand feet above, at least athousand feet above, and then for a
while completely vanished. And then atone point he says, he seems to
(21:04):
be playing some sort of a game. M He says, um, well,
it was a game. It wasa cat and mouse game, you
know, and Fred was the mouse. Unfortunately, you know, this thing
was flying rings around him. Heactually said, it's flying over me a
two three times at a time atspeeds I cannot identify. That's an amazing
(21:27):
Well hang on, try unpacking thatfor a minute. What does that mean?
What can fly over you at twoto three times at once at a
time. It's just completely bizarre.You know. It's a very very strange
description, a very detailed and compactdescription of something very odd going on,
(21:49):
And of course he's trying to problemsolve this in a in a in a
pilot's way, isn't he like he'she's not up there, um, you
know, talking about at this ina in a in an ordinary civilian ways.
He's addressing this problem that he's got, trying to troubleshoot it with Steve
Roby at Tullamarine on the ground,and and he's trying to compress that those
(22:11):
sort of statements, isn't he well? And from Steve's point of view,
there's not very much you can dowhen you're talking to somebody over a two
way radio and you're you know,you're holding the microphone in one hand flying
a plane with the other m youknow, and there's not really much Steve
can do it except observe and listenand talk to him. I mean Steve
(22:33):
can't see anything, of course,it's just all over the air. It's
a radio communication and that's all.Yeah, exactly. So what the book?
What was your aim in so inwriting the book? What was what
were you trying to trying to achieve? And what were you what points were
you trying to make or what newinformation were you were you trying to present
(22:57):
to a century audience. Well,it's a pretty complicated question to answer.
Fred. My first thing is I'vecome across a lot of websites where they
discuss various websites, especially once withpilots. People in the aviation industry have
(23:22):
little websites where they all get onand chat about various things. And every
now and then the Valentage case willcome up and they all start talking about,
Oh, yeah, he's the guywho was flying upside down and got
disorientated and crashed into the sea.Okay, well, if that happened,
you crash assess now into the seafrom four and a half thousand feet because
he was just asked what's your actuallevel by Stevens and his answer was four
(23:48):
thousand and five hundred feet. Youcrash the plane from that hide into the
sea, things break up, youget and you're going to get stuff floating,
and they would have found something.They would have found, yeah,
and even aviation fuel would have leakedfrom the impact, would have the tanks
would have popped or burst or something. There would have been some fluid somewhere
(24:11):
and aviation fuel floats on the water. They found some diesel fuel, which
turned out to be marine diesel fuel. They don't run aircraft on that stuff
as far as I'm aware. No, So different different, different fuel.
Yeah, and the engines, youknow, have a different everything's different.
(24:33):
You were sort of trying to getto put the record straight in some ways,
like people were making uninformed, youknow statements. Some of the things
people say about Fred are disgusting,to be quite honesty, They really they
discussed me the things they say abouthim, and they laugh about him and
say that he was an incompetent foolwho wanted to see a u FO.
(24:56):
Nothing could be further from the truth. He had seen he had had a
UFO siding, and he'd also seenUFO records that were held at the Air
Force base when he was an aircadet. UM they had they thought he
was so good at and so enthusiasticabout flying. They wanted him to become
(25:18):
a trainer so he could train otherpeople to fly. But he didn't get
into the Air Force, so thatnever happened. So that's why he pursued
a career in um commercial aviation becausehe couldn't get into the Air Force.
The Air Force on he take thetop um, top two or three percent
of the population. You've got tohave an IQ of about six thousand,
(25:41):
you know, to get into theair Force's Fred's the beans. Fred was
clever enough, but not clever enough, not that high level. You know
how anyone in the population has thathigh level of you know, of of
academic proficiency. You know, it'sa very very very elite group of people
(26:04):
that it get to fly our fighterjets. But he was good at being
a pilot. He was good,He was good competent um, he was
able to competently control an aircraft.His girlfriend went up with him a few
times, Ronda, and only youknow, Ronda, you better. She
said that he sometimes flew acrobatics whenshe was in the plane. Well she
(26:29):
trying to make a throw up orsomething. Well, I mean, yeah,
how acrobatic. Can you get anassessment? Imagine doing a loop the
loop or something, you know,Yes, no, that's that's what Fred
was doing, just showing off.He could, you know, he could
fly the plane. He knew whathe was doing. I think any other
(26:49):
pilot that was in his situation atthat time, at that time, at
that place would have encountered the sameabsolutely, And when you read the transcript
or pay close attention to it,you can see that this is a pilot
who is trouble shooting this particular problemthat he's got, and it's a very
(27:10):
unique problem. He's trying to identifyit. He can't identify. They ask
Steve Robi asks him, can youidentify the aircraft? And he says,
he says, he says no.He says that all I can tell you
is that it's a long shape.As it goes past, I can't tell
you more than that it's got suchspeed. So as it goes past,
(27:33):
it's a long shape and it hassuch speed. At one point he said,
it looks like landing lights. Oh, they've had a mistake, I
think in the transcription too. Veryearly on when he says, is there
any known aircraft below five thousand rightat the beginning, and Steve says no
(27:53):
known aircraft and then says, Ihave seems to be a large aircraft blow
five thousand. But the transcript theyheard that wrong, they said, they
said the friends said I am,I am, seems to be a large
(28:14):
aircraft below five thousand. Didn't makesense. He actually says, I have
what seems to I have seems tobe a large aircraft. So I've written
that in the book. I've triedto make it a more accurate transcript.
But also something that was pointed outby Dick Haynes when he was out here.
Doctor Richard Haynes from NASSA wrote abook very early on about this case
(28:36):
too, called Melbourne Episode. TheCase Study of Missing Pilot was a very
disappointing book to read. It wasa very very dry read and very disappointing.
And I couldn't remember everybody who wasgetting behind and saying, oh,
this is very exciting and then we'llwe all ready, but we were going
what this going on about? Hemade up four different made up stories of
(28:57):
what might have happened to Fred otherthan him having an encounter with what he
described just complete waste of time,you know. But I do use that
book as a reference because it hadthe tradescript in it, even though it
was inaccurate, and they mixed thepages up as well, so complete mix
up, unfortunately. But that bookcame out in ninety two, I think
(29:22):
or something, and it's out ofprint. There's another book that came out
called The Devil's Meridian, which hasa lot about a lot about the Valentiage
case in that a lot of detailabout other things going on around the time
too. Very very good reference,very good reference book, that one,
But that's not in print anymore.That was done by a couple of journalists
from Sydney, I think, yeah, and that up until your book has
(29:48):
probably been the best one for ageneral reader to look at and get a
good handle on it. And nowyou've sort of brought that into the twenty
first century for a new I'm hopingto that. Devil's Regim was by Killian
Leicster. Yeah, it came outin nineteen eighty Yeah, so many years.
(30:12):
It's been out of print for manyyears. And let's see, Richard
Haynes's book came out in nineteen eightynine, so it's been a long time
since we had fresh eyes on it. Yeah. Well, also I wanted
to I got permission to use thatphotograph, the roy Manifold photo on the
(30:32):
front cover, well, to useit at all in the book, but
I decided to put it on thefront cover because I think it's such a
stunning photograph. That photo the RoydManifold took because he wasn't aware that there
was anything there when he took thatshot. For those are looking at his
watch, yeah, he wasn't.For those who weren't familiar with that,
that was the series of photographs thatwere taken um near Cape Otway by a
(30:57):
plumber who was on holiday at thesame time that Fred flew flew over a
very similar time to that. Sothose photos were sent away to America for
analysis and they were There was alot of scrutiny put onto those pictures because
it really does tie and adds alot of weight to what Fred was reporting.
(31:17):
Yeah, well it's a very oddobject too. He took a series
of six photographs pictures, Yeah,and it was only the fifth one that
had this unusual object in it.Mum. I think the fourth photo had
a disturbance in the water. Itlooked like there was, but the sea
(31:38):
was nearly flat. I'll just bakeup again on the screen. I've just
brought the book cover back up andyeah, so for people who are who
are looking, you'll see that thisis the photo that George is talking about
on the cover of Nothing on Radar. So that object there, and I've
had it on this show in previousepisode as well, when I did an
episode on Fred valentis previously, soyou can see this is the object that
(32:00):
Fred's talking about that was taken byRoy on the and that's the very night
that Fred disappeared, so you cansee it was a beautiful evening. And
the object you've got the sort ofthe top it's like a spinning top sort
of a shape, and the andthe sort of the the energy coming off
to the left and the cloud tothe right. So it's a it's an
(32:21):
amazing, amazing picture. It is. What it trigged me by, it
is the little an area next tothe object is like a blue sparkly area
in the sky. It's not inthe previous photos or the one after.
Just in this photo, just aroundthis object, there's a field of like
blue sparkles and the camera has pickedit up. Yeah. And what's interesting
(32:47):
about that is we had a ladywhen when my daughter was going to either
kindergarten or pre kinder there's kindergarten inthe very next street to us, and
there was That was the other timeI started going to the committee or becoming
(33:08):
a member of the committee, andmy wife had mentioned for some reason that
I was she thought I was goingto miss some event that was significant in
the life of our little daughter wasgrowing up, because I was going to
go to this darn committee meeting andthey said what committee is that, and
(33:29):
then she said the UFO Research Committee, and this lady just started laughing,
said, Ah, that's that's awhole lot of bunkum that stuff, it's
a lot of rubbish. A coupleof weeks later, she was standing at
my front door, excited like crazy, jumping out of a skin, jumping
up and down on the spot,wanting to tell me about a UFO sighting.
She had just had so gone froma complete skeptic to seeing one.
(33:54):
And the one that she saw flewright over her house. She could see
it. She was washing the dishes, standing at the kitchen window looking out
on the horizon. There was abig, bright light coming towards the getting
bigger and bigger and bigger, andshe said to her husband, Hey,
come and look at this, Comeand look at this, and he wasn't
(34:15):
interested, and she was just aboutscreaming by the time it was got bigger
and bigger. They both ran intothe backyard to watch this thing go over,
and it was so big it waslike the size of a football field.
It marked the whole sky out asit went over, and it was
silent. They had a big rowof lights along the front edge of it.
(34:37):
And she said this, She wasinterested in this big object that went
over there. Where we live here, the beach goes right there's a beach
side suburb. There's a whole rowof suburbs, and we've got the bay
Port fill of bay right there,so all the beaches are down there now.
The planes from Rabbit Airport fly upand down along the beach. It's
(35:00):
a good for them because if somethinggoes wrong, they could land on the
beach without hitting houses and stuff.Well, this thing was going along the
same way where all the planes go, and it went right over her place
and went right over here. AndI wasn't home, so I didn't see
anything. But what she said wasshe could see a plane going along near
(35:22):
the beach, and she could hearthe plane down over It's about half a
kilometer from her house, but youcan hear the planes as they go along.
This huge thing blocked the whole skyout when above her, made no
sound, and it wasn't a balloon. It was like the size of a
football field and silent, but whather husband was really interested in. It
(35:49):
was not only that this big objectwas flying along silently, but there was
on one side of it there wasa big field of bright blue sparkling in
there. Wow, so this iscoming back to similar to what we see
on the row manifold photo. That'swhat you can see in the manifold photo.
Yeah. Yeah, so when youso so listeners, when you go
(36:14):
out and peaches George's book, havea really good look at that cover photo
and you'll see quite clearly what he'stalking about with that blue sparkle coming off
the coming off the object. That'sit's really good to see a similar a
similar story like that. Now withthe disappearance, there's the theories have raged
over the years, haven't they,George, about about what happened. There's
(36:36):
the theories that he went into aspiral, ended up in the ocean,
that he was flying upside down,that he crashed and he flew off to
South Australia somewhere. There's you knowthat he was, that he was running
drugs everything under the stun. Peoplesaw him in Argentina, like there was
all these stories that came out aboutFred. Yeah. One in connection was
one that you received several years agowas about armor in South Australia. Would
(37:01):
you like to tell that for alittle for a little while, right,
okay, okay, Well that thatis a more recent development. Yes.
What happened was there was a lotof UFO sightings happening in New South Wales,
in central New South Wales and aroundKunebara Brand and Bill Chalker was investigating
(37:22):
them all and he went and visiteda lot of people that were spoke a
lot of witnesses and a lot ofthem said, oh, you've got to
go and talk to this guy calledLorrie. Right, this bloke called Lorrie
ran the local hardware store in KunebaraBrand and several of them, so you've
got to go and talk to him. What he was doing was he would
(37:45):
talk to all of his customers andask any of them if they'd ever had
anything any unusual sightings or experiences ofany type, and when they when they
said down they had, he wouldwrite it all down. He was documented
basically all the UFO sightings. Andthe funny thing is that is a it's
(38:07):
a bit like Wickliffe Wells Brand,like a very very hot Australian hot spot
for UFO sides UFO activity, andthere's a lot of telescopes up there.
You know that there's a lot oftelescopes in the area. Now, I
haven't actually been to Gooding a baronbrand myself, but there's a lot of
a lot of skywatching going on upthere, and a lot of stuff comes
(38:30):
from there, a lot of reportscome from there. So anyway, Bill
was out there talking to this people. He chased up this guy called Laurie.
His name was Laurie Rider. Nowhe he got really up in arms
when John Howard tried to get everybody'sguns handed in, remember after the shooting
(38:51):
down in Tasmania, Yes, soumaround that time. Laurie was very upset
because he was on the side ofall the farmers. All the farmers,
he said, needed to be ableto keep their guns because they need them
on the land, you know.So so he's well known in the community
up there for that sort of stuff. I'm making a stand against the government
(39:16):
and that's fair enough, I guess. But he claimed that he documented all
these ufocuses and he said the mostinteresting one of the lot was when his
farmer from South Australia came in.He'd moved up there and he came into
the shop one day and so Laurieasked the farmer. We never got the
(39:38):
guy's name, by the way,but Laurie asked his farmer, you know,
what's the strangest thing that you've everseen? And the farmer said,
well, there was there was aguy. He said, I was.
I was harvesting lucern, which theyused for crop feed down in South Australia
(40:00):
on the river in a sort ofarea somewhere around between say Keith and murray
Bridge, somewhere down that way.And he said it was farming, and
there was this very unusual noise thatstarted up, and he thought there was
something wrong with his equipments, farmequipment, so he uncoupled it because all
runs off the tractor's motor, butthat you can uncouple the equipment, which
(40:23):
he did, and he went tothe back to see what's gone wrong,
maybe a bearing or something, butthe noise continued. The equipment was stationary
and not moving, but he wasstill getting the noise. So he's trying
to figure out, hang on,what's this song hearing And then he looked
up and then he saw this largeflying discs is hovering above him, and
(40:50):
he checked it out very closely,because, as as Laurie described, a
lot of these farmers actually are pilots. They do a lot of crop dusting
on their properties. So they flytheir own little planes around and they they
do their own crop dusting. It'spart of being a farmer, I guess.
And they have airstrips at the endof their property. And so he
(41:17):
expected this object to have to maintaina virtual a certain amount of speed to
stay airborne. He said, thiswasn't going fast enough. He thought it
was going to drop. So heran. He ran, He left his
track and just ran away to getclear of this big round object. It's
(41:37):
just in case it fell down,because he couldn't see any reason for it
to be supported. And he saidthere was. It had like an outer
band, two outer bands that werecounter rotational on the outer each of this
thing. And he said, butone band was going very quickly, the
other one was not going very fastat all. And they were a little
(42:00):
spurts of flame coming out of oneend of this object. He thought this,
and it was making horrible screeching noise. They thought, there's something wrong
with his thing. And so that'swhy he ran away. But then from
when he got away from it andlooked back, then he said he could
see that it had a dome ontop, so it was a round object
(42:21):
from underneath, but had a domeon top. And he said it looked
like it had an archway door likea church store on the side of the
dome. He said there were nohandles and no windows or anything. And
then he said as it sort ofrotated as it hovered there, something came
into view and he said it wasan Assessna aircraft was kind of stuck or
(42:45):
attached to the side of this object, just sitting there. That's an amazing
and he couldn't work it out.He said that there were no chains or
hopes or anything holding it up,but there was oil running down. He
thought there was oil running down theoutside of the cessna um And I when
(43:09):
I imagine it, you know,this description, it was a very clear
description. It reminds me of,you know, like saying, how insects
get stuck to the front of acar or a truck, you know,
or all over the bumper, youknow, get things stuck on it.
It just seems to me to besomething like that. They've they've come together,
(43:30):
there's been an aerial collision. Nowif this and he said there was
a registration number on the wing,he could read the registration number of the
plane on the wing. And he'sread that and he's written it down.
He's scratched it into the tractor's paintwork with a nail, so he wouldn't
(43:50):
forget. He didn't have a penand paper on him, being a farmer.
Nail scratched it into the tractor.There's got to be a tractor out
there somewhere with vhds J scratch didn'tdo it. I'd love to find it,
but we don't know a farmer's name. We don't know his name,
so we can't find it. Butyou did. You did make some significant
(44:15):
attempts to try though, didn't you. Look. Yeah, I just about
went broke making funk calls talking tofarmers in the New South Wales area.
I managed to find the name ofa guy. A number of people that
I spoke to. I was askinghim, do you know, do you
remember somebody who moved here from SouthAustralia And they all come up with this
(44:36):
same guy's name. And I trackedhim down and I got his number.
I phoned him and spoke to him, and he didn't know anything about what
I must have sound like a reallunatic to him, you know. And
he had an unusual name. Hewas known as Church First Church Church Mason
was his name. Yeah, andI think he's still alive anyway. Look,
(45:00):
I've I made a model to tryto illustrate what that would have looked
like for the farmer, And it'sin the book. And here's this photo
that I made. Oh, yes, you can see that. Yeah,
the plane. Could you see that, the planet stuck with the side hang
(45:21):
on, Yes, like that,it's just perfect there. Yeah, and
you can see the ground is downthere with the trees are Yeah, there's
this thing up above and there's aplane stuck to it and you can read
the registration number on the wing.Yeah. That's just a little model that
I I mocked that up, justjust a will straight what I imagined when
(45:44):
I was hearing the tape this farmertelling the story. That that's how how
it appeared to me in my mind. And that could be completely wrong for
that, but it's it's what whatthe guy described. This Fred disappeared was
all it was. It was veryclose it was the Sunday morning, fredchisoned
(46:04):
on the Saturday, Saturday evening.Yeah, this was on the Sunday morning,
but in Adelaide. Yeah yeah,so right place, right time.
So well that's sort of there couldhave been anywhere in Australia, I guess.
But it was the next day,the next morning, and the farmer
said that he watched the thing flyaway and it was still making screeching noise
(46:29):
as it flew away. Now,I also got I wrote about that and
put it in the Uthologists magazine,and I've got various people emailed me who'd
read the magazine article and contacted meto tell me that they had similar stories.
One was a guy who's a wasa cameraman working for Channel two in
Adelaide. He said, when hewas five or six years old, he
(46:52):
and his brother got woken up inthe early hours of the morning. And
it was nineteen seventy eight eight,so when he was five sea and they
woke up, so he had afunny rumbling noise and they looked out the
window and there was this big circularobject hovering over their house and the house
across the road at the same time. It was big and it woke them
(47:13):
up, but they didn't see anaeroplane stuck to the side of it.
But it was around the same timeand this thing was making a funny noise
and it woke them up. Channelseven Comeraman So I wrote about that in
the book too. That's the excellentSo we've got some So the whole farmer
angle was was sort of you know, it really sort of adds another strange
(47:37):
to mention to to what potentially happenedif Fred um, So, what are
your thoughts, what do you thinkhappened to him? What's your take on
it? Look, the funny thingis when it comes to the US subject,
anything's possible and nothing's too strange ortoo bizarre. You know, you
(47:59):
hear you've heard about alien abductions andthings like that, and they're doing genetic
experiments on humans and all this sortof stuff. All of that's pretty weird
too. There's nothing that's that strange. It couldn't be true. But for
some people. When Bill first heardthis story and had he was recording,
I've got the tape recording of thethe guy from Colne Barbrand telling the story
(48:24):
that what the farmer told him.We have that on tape. It's a
fairly good recording and I've transcribed thattape and that's in the book here as
well, so you can read whatLaurie said. He described his band alternate,
these bands spinning around, and howthe thing, how he scratched it
(48:45):
with the tractor with the bar reggionumber. So it's nothing that bizarre,
really, I mean, it's itsort of explains why there was no wreckage
found if there was an aerial collision. And on the documentary that we did
with the Science Channel, when whenDick Haynes played the tape of that seventeen
(49:08):
seconds of that metallic noise and hewas saying that could be the sound of
these two objects coming together. WhenBill saw that, that reminded him of
this farmer saying that he saw thesessions stuck to the side of the thing.
It all seemed to make sense.Now to some people that doesn't make
any sense, but it's no lesssensical than any other UFA's story. Well,
(49:32):
you know, the facts are yeah, exactly one hundred percent, and
the fact that you know he wascircul he was he was traveling at four
and a half thousand feet and ifhe had he would have broken up in
the water, and they've searched forhim very quickly in the weeks afterwards as
well, um with pc orians andstuff. So you would have thought they
would have found some wreckage if heended up into Bass Strait. So you
(49:54):
know, given that metallic sound andthis other story that's come about, it's
it's certainly at another dimension to it. Yeah. Yeah, So we're sort
of leaping forwards step by step,very small baby steps, though it's not
really the leap. We're going forwardvery slowly because it's very hard. Hopefully
(50:17):
this book might help to cement theidea in people's minds that there could have
been an aerial collision. Fred probablydidn't end up in the sea. The
plane probably did not disappear in thesea. We've had people that tell us
that divers have found aircraft at thebottom of the sea near capey Way,
and that they had the same registrationnumber as Fred's plane. But you've been
(50:42):
people have been able to fake photosin laboratories for a hundred years. Photography
has been within a hundred years.I've never seen those photographs that were taken
by those divers. They were apparentlypublished, but I've never seen them and
the story abot. Some divers foundsome planes under the sea, and one
(51:02):
of them was Fred's plane and thedoor was Ajar. There was no human
remains in the plane. M ButI've never seen those photos. There's no
evidence, there is no evidence thatthe plane was ever found at the bottom
of the sea. No, thereis no evidence. Only the cowling that
was that was washed up on Flinder'sIsland many years later, like you know,
(51:23):
and that's five years later, fiveyears later, and it was not
not conclusively proven to be a partof his plane or that was from the
same it was the same type ofplane. The serial number didn't didn't match.
It was found only a couple ofhundred meters from the runway of that
of that of that island. Andit is a part that's known to disappear
(51:47):
m every now, and they're onthe planes they when they serviced to plane,
their photo of the air that airintakes disappeared. It's only held in
it by a couple of rivets.And it's it's not a crucial part of
the airplane. It comes to driftand rattles off and flies away and gets
lost. The plane can still flyand operate normally. Yeah, it's not
(52:09):
going to bring it out of thesky. It's like losing a rear vision
mirror or something. You can stilldrive your car. You're not going to
crash because you lost your rear visionmirror. It's something like that. It's
akin to that. It's not thatimportant. But but in the match,
yeah, the numbers, the registeror the serial number of the parts did
(52:30):
not match that of the missing aircraft. So and oh the other thing is
what's convenient about it. It wasfound a m Flinders Island, near the
airport on Flinders Island and where regishippiedwas on near King Island, heading towards
King Island. I'll just bring thatmap back up there. So, yeah,
(52:52):
King Islands to the right. Yeah, Flinders is on the right there.
Now there's about a three hundred kilometergap between those islands. I guess
which direction the water current flows theother way? Yeah, so we would
have to flow against the current forfive years, for four or five years
(53:13):
against the current to get to Flinder'sIsland if it came from where Fred was.
Yes, that's really that's a bitof a stretch. You know,
I personally believe that's a stretch aswell. Um, and hopefully, you
know, perhaps with the release ofthis of the new book, maybe some
new information might come to light aswell. Well. I would like to
(53:37):
know who the farmer was. Somebodymust know who the farmer was. He
must have spoken to somebody about it, because it's that ridicule factor, you
see. People don't they'll say,oh, look, I saw you a
foe. I'll tell you all aboutit, but you can't use my name.
Don't use my name because that thathappened, You know that Kibble,
(53:57):
You know that James Kibble. Yes, that was his attitude for years.
He let them have his photo.He reported what he saw and that he
took the photo. That's a veryinteresting object in that photo that he took
that side on. Yeah, Georgetold about the ball one photo that was
taken on April nineteen sixty six.Yeah, just a few days before Westall
(54:21):
happened. Yea, and only it'slike less than twenty k's from Westall.
Right, And you can't deny afterall these years that there must be some
connection between the two. Oh,you know, there must be some connection,
no question. But Kibble did nothave his name associated with that photo
(54:43):
for about thirty or forty years.It was only in the last few years
that he owned up that it washim and he took the photo. And
that's because of this ridicule thing.Now now that he's retired. You know,
he didn't have the he didn't thinkit was going to be any harm
done having his name associated with it. But you know, he took that
photo and he nearly broke his nosewith the camera when he pulled it up
(55:06):
quickly to his face to take theshot. Camera, he nearly he banged
himself of the nose with the camera. He nearly broke Oh wow, Well,
we're actually lucky to get that incrediblephoto. We're actually out of time.
We've come to the end of theepisode, which is we could talk
for another two hours about this,so I just want to bring the backup.
(55:30):
So this is George's book, Nothingon Radar, The Valentiche Mystery,
available on Amazon now, so besure to get on and an audio copy.
And hopefully we've given you a nicelittle teaser about the contents. And
George, thank you so much forjoining me tonight on this episode. And
(55:50):
you know, we look forward toseeing I'm record you're reading the book,
and I'm sure other people are goingto really look forward to getting an updated,
um, you know, a versionof what's happened in you know,
into the twenty first century. Sothank you very much for joining me tonight.
It's been it's been my pleasure,Ben. It's always nice talking to
(56:12):
you. And yeah, I hopeeverybody don't just buy one copy of the
book by two give one to yourbest friend. Yeah idea, that's a
that's a wonderful idea. So andI'll get George and one again in the
future too, so we can wecan do another follow up. But thanks
again, George, good on you, Ben. Thanks very much for having
me over, Bro,
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