The Westall Encounter: Australia's Most Profound UFO Sighting

On April 8th, 2006, a few dozen former pupils of Westall High School in Melbourne, Australia, gathered for a touching school reunion that was unusual to say the least. I feel quite sad in a way that I’ve never attended a school reunion. I’m not sure if nobody has ever bothered to organise such an event for my old school year, or if I just didn’t get to hear about it because everyone forgot about me after I quietly dropped off the education radar at the age of about 13.

But maybe I’m not missing that much. After talking to mates from other schools who made the effort to attend reunions, I was left with the impression that the events largely boiled down to everyone trying to make out what massively successful lives they’ve led since limping feebly out of the school with zero qualifications. I would have at least hoped to have seen a long-awaited showdown between the former school bully and the former school wimp who has been waiting patiently for his revenge after spending the last 20 years in the gym.

You wouldn’t have seen anything like that at The Westall High School reunion, though. By all accounts, this first reunion of many was a highly cordial and civilised affair, but the topics of conversation were curiously limited. There would have been no lively retellings of the time that Sniffer Jenkins accidentally set his own hair on fire with a Bunsen burner, or the time that Mr Bottomley got chased out of his classroom by a runaway dog. There would have been only one incident on the minds of all the attendees of the Westall High School reunion: That morning in 1966 when the flying saucer landed and nobody was ever allowed to talk about it for years.

A Mass Sighting Unlike Any Other

You know how this shit usually goes down. A flying saucer is spotted by one or two ‘enthusiasts’ who set up camp in the wilderness after hearing rumours of sightings of strange activity in the skies. These starry-eyed UFO-spotters are now the only two people on Planet Earth to have witnessed the extraterrestrial craft with their own eyes, but everybody dismisses their story as attention-seeking fantasy, apart from a small online group of similarly-dedicated truth hunters who once saw a flying saucer hovering over Bognor Regis.

This is what makes The Westall Encounter so strikingly different from the usual fare. We’re not just talking about one or two witnesses who are somewhat lacking in credibility and good hygiene. We’re talking about approximately 300 witnesses, the majority of whom were in attendance at Westall High School on that quite incredible morning.

And yet despite this unusually high number of witnesses, the story received relatively little press coverage before falling completely silent for decades. Some of the witnesses claim to have been threatened into keeping their mouths shut, and we have still yet to hear the results of any official investigation into what may still be one of the most infamous UFO sightings in Australia and indeed the world.

So was it a hoax, a case of mass delusion, a sinister government cover-up, or a genuine sighting of a flying saucer observed by hundreds of people in broad daylight?

The Setting: A Place That Never Officially Existed

It’s a story which feels weird right from the very beginning, because Westall has never even existed. Well, it kind of does exist, but not officially. The location we’re actually talking about is Clayton South, a small and unremarkable Australian suburb populated by around 13,000 citizens, sitting around 13 miles southeast from Melbourne’s city centre.

The area sometimes goes by the unofficial nickname of Westall as this is the name of the main road in the suburb and the local railway station. And it was a name also adopted by the local school, now known as Westall Secondary College but known back then as Westall High School.

The school hosted approximately 600 pupils back in the day, which might make you wonder why the witness count wasn’t considerably higher. But as most versions of the story tend to indicate that the incident occurred during lesson time, we can only assume that around half of the pupils were not aware of what was going on outside, or were unfortunate enough to have a misery-guts teacher who stopped them from joining in the panicked throng.

It’s very difficult to piece together a single cohesive account of that morning though, as many of the witness accounts vary significantly. Very little was said about the encounter at the time, and it’s only in relatively recent years that so many witnesses have taken the decision to finally share their memories of the saga for the benefit of anniversary news reports and Australian TV documentaries.

One voice in particular was heard louder than the others.

Andrew Greenwood: The Foundation of the Story

Andrew Greenwood was a science teacher at Westall High School in the 1960s, and he seems to be pretty much the only witness who gave a private interview at the time to American physicist Dr James E. McDonald, the audio of which was only made public decades later. Andrew Greenwood has also been the most prolific contributor to documentaries and news reports in more recent years, and so it’s the former science teacher’s testimony that we’ll use as the foundation to recount the most widely heard version of The Westall Encounter, mixed in with occasionally conflicting contributions from some of the dozens of other witnesses who have since dared to come forward to relive The Day of The Flying Saucer.

The Morning of April 6th, 1966

The UFO hovered over Westall High School on the morning of April 6th 1966. The first discrepancy of many that we have to contend with is the exact time and what the pupils of the school had been doing with themselves directly before the flying saucer spun into view.

Some witnesses claim that the incident occurred during recess at around 10:15 am, which would have meant that all the kids would have been outside smoking cigarettes and sniffing glue. But in that case, it would seem unlikely that at least half the kids never even spotted it. Others suggest that it happened during lessons at around 11:00 am, which makes you wonder how many kids were just staring idly out of the window at the exact right time.

The most likely scenario, as given by teacher Andrew Greenwood, is that the encounter did indeed take place during lessons at around 11 am, but some of the kids were enjoying the glorious wonders of physical education outside in the school yard. And it was this group of students who were temporarily distracted from their games of cricket, netball, hockey sticks, and, I dunno, bull riding, when they became the first group to spot the craft from another world.

Andrew Greenwood reckons that P.E teacher Miss Jeanette Muir from New Zealand was amongst that first batch of witnesses, as she was alerted to a new presence in the skies from her shrieking students. Andrew himself was tucked away in a smelly science classroom at the time, but his lesson was rudely interrupted by a hysterical student from Jeanette Muir’s class who had come running back inside the school in panic to announce that aliens were hovering outside the school.

Andrew initially assumed that the student had just come up with an extraordinarily imaginative way to bunk off P.E. But his lesson spiralled out of control as the students raced to the window to get a look for themselves, before everyone started making a stampede to the door, with Andrew Greenwood in hot pursuit.

Chaos in the School Yard

By the time Andrew got there, Jeanette Muir and three other male teachers were attempting to get the kids back into the school over concerns for their safety. Whilst some of the children complied, the majority of them were now out of control, chasing around the playground to get a better view of the craft as it slowly glided south towards a local wooded heath known as The Grange Reserve.

The object was widely described as a “cup turned upside down on a saucer” which was about twice the size of a car and bore no obvious markings of any kind. Some say that it was grey or silver whilst others reckon that it had a kind of purple hue. Some say that it was completely silent, whilst others claim that they could hear a quiet vibrating or throbbing noise. Rather more significantly, most say that there was only one flying saucer, whilst others – including second form student Joy Clarke – suggested that there were at least three.

Andrew Greenwood recently gave his own observations to 7News Spotlight in 2021: “I can remember looking into the sky, and seeing these things, and just standing there absolutely transfixed. It was a grey, almost cylindrical or cigar shaped object which moved with some degree of precision in the sky. I saw a craft. A mechanical object intelligently controlled hovering above me.”

In the same 7News Spotlight feature, former student Terry Peck, who was just eleven years old at the time, revealed: “I could feel heat and hear this buzzing sound. I could see purple lights all around it. I was quite stunned to see it because I didn’t know what it was. It was like what you see in stories about flying saucers.”

There was a general consensus that the craft was darting around at incredible speeds, almost like a dragonfly trapped in a bottle. It would hover ominously in the same spot for just a few moments before suddenly blinking away from view and then quickly reappearing in either a much higher or much lower spot above the school.

The Cessna Planes

But another element to the sighting that not everyone can agree on is the number of planes – presumably piloted by humans – that were on the flying saucer’s tail, with numbers varying from between five to zero. Whilst a few witnesses can’t recall ever seeing any other craft, most have claimed that there were also between three to five light Cessna planes in the air.

This sight wouldn’t have been unusual in itself, as the school was only around three miles away from Moorabbin Airport, and you could regularly spot pilots engaging in training exercises in the skies above Clayton South. But these Cessna planes were clearly on a different sort of mission altogether.

It looked as if they were attempting to circle the strange craft but had ended up becoming embroiled in an almost comical game of cat and mouse. Andrew Greenwood recalled in his private interview taped in the 1960s that five Cessna planes were attempting to pull off some pretty complicated manoeuvres in their bid to apprehend the flying saucer whilst ideally not crashing into each other during the process. But it was like the sheep were just taking the piss with the new sheepdog. Every time the planes got close to the object, it would rapidly accelerate away from them and then reappear in another spot of the sky where it would cheekily hover for a few moments before the planes came back for another go.

This apparently went on for a full twenty minutes, during which time there were now up to 300 pupils in the school yard getting increasingly excited, along with a few teachers who were getting increasingly frustrated with the kids who were refusing to obey orders and go inside to hide from the impending alien invasion.

The Principal Intervenes

The headmaster – sorry, we’re in Australia so I should say the principal – Frank Samblebe appeared to have been napping for the last twenty minutes and had missed most of the commotion. By the time he came furiously marching outside to demand that the pupils return to their classes with immediate effect, the alien craft and indeed the Cessna planes had disappeared from view, heading somewhere in the direction of The Grange Reserve.

It seems that the voice of Principal Frank Samblebe carried a bit more authority than the voices of either Mr Greenwood, Miss Muir, or any of the other teachers out in the yard at the time. The vast majority of students – either in fear of Mr Samblebe or in resignation that the flying saucer had disappeared anyway – strolled back into the school. But not all of them.

The Chase to The Grange Reserve

Some of the more rebellious souls decided to jump over the school gates in an attempt to follow the craft, although some members of this rebellious gang were also becoming hysterical and shrieking with fright. One former student Mary Eastwood recalls that she and her friend ended up sitting on a fence that they had just scaled and cried their eyes out in the belief that they were witnessing the end of the world. Other pupils were reportedly collapsing in sheer terror before they could reach the Grange.

The few who were brave enough to make it all the way to the wooded heath – a small group which now included not just errant pupils but a few residents and local farm workers whose curiosity had been aroused by all the noisy drama – were to witness the final reported sighting of the flying saucer. This select group of people claim to have caught a close-up view of the alien craft as it hovered above the trees before suddenly darting off into the far distance in a northwest direction, never to be seen again.

It left behind around five of those Cessna planes in its wake, all of which presumably gave up after having lost their target, and flew back home in defeat.

The Scorched Crop Circle

But the craft left behind something else too – a perfect circular flattened imprint on the scorched grass. Some might even call it a crop circle.

This was of particular interest to woodwork teacher Gerry Shepherd who hadn’t actually witnessed any of this alleged activity – he was probably one of the stricter teachers who had barked at his class to ignore all the fuss outside and get on with constructing their wonky shoe racks on wheels. But he did claim that he later saw the scorched crop circle for himself. And although Mr Shepherd never fully got on board with the UFO story, he did reveal that he knew the area like the back of his hand and never understood how such a perfect circle had formed without any nearby evidence of vehicle, animal, or human tracks. And he has never seen anything like it since.

The circle apparently wasn’t around for very long, though. When one former student Kevin Hurley went back for another look a few days later, possibly to convince himself that he hadn’t just dreamt the whole thing, he was surprised to discover that The Grange Reserve had been cordoned off. He attempted to sneak in for a closer look but was apprehended by a group of men in military uniform who had been wandering around the site with strange equipment – possibly including a Geiger counter – before downing tools for a moment to tell this young curious kid to piss off out of the way.

By the time the Victorian Flying Saucer Research Society rolled into town to examine the evidence just a few days after this, the grouchy soldiers had gone. But so had the crop circle. Along with pretty much everything else. They found that the entire field had been burnt to a crisp, sparking suspicion that the military had deliberately tried to get rid of any roots of remaining evidence after they’d finished messing around with their Geiger counters and telling nice little kids to piss off.

However, the farmer who actually owned the land tells a different story – he reckons that he was getting fed up with local kids returning to the scene and trampling all over his fields, and so he burned it down himself to discourage nuisance trespassers. That’s a good little tip to bear in mind for the future – discourage potential burglars by burning your house and all your belongings down to the ground.

A Remarkably Quiet Press Response

You’d have thought that an incident on this scale would have whipped up a massive press frenzy, but the Australian newspapers were remarkably quiet whilst the rest of the world largely just ignored The Westall Encounter. The only Australian paper to get a little excited about the story was ‘The Dandenong Journal’ who ran with it on their cover for almost two weeks. One of their most memorable front pages featured the bold headline: “Flying Saucer Mystery! School Silent!

What Was It??” This particular article noted how all attempts to get any further information from the school about the incident had been met with a playground wall of silence – a point to which we’ll return in a moment.

Other articles from The Dandenong Journal over this two-week period reported how the police and government officials had strongly denied that any such incident had taken place, whilst an Army spokesman was quoted denying any kind of military presence at all within Clayton South.

Many years later, a guy who claimed to be a contract photographer for The Dandenong Journal claimed to have supplied the paper with photographs of the scorched crop circle but for reasons that he never understood, the photographs were never used.

The only other paper to take the slightest bit of interest in the story was ‘The Age’ but they had a rather more subdued take on the matter. They went with a relatively small article buried deep within the pages which bore the less-than-tantalising headline ‘Object Perhaps Balloon’. This piece explained how a large group of pupils had witnessed an unidentified flying object, but it was more than likely just a weather balloon. ‘The Age’ seemed convinced that such a weather balloon had most definitely been launched that morning from the town of Laverton which is just under 30 miles away from South Clayton, and had probably been blown across the school on the westerly wind.

If any explanation of the incident can be deemed as ‘official’, it’s usually this article from ‘The Age’ which gets whipped out to explain what really happened. But it’s far from definitive.

The bigger newspapers only bothered to reference the story at all in satirical cartoons poking fun at the whole silly saga.

The Thwarted Television Report

But it did look for a while as if the story was going to make it onto television when a crew from Channel 9 turned up at the school gates to interview the students and teachers who had witnessed The Westall Encounter. Former student Joy Tighe later recalled the initial buzz of excitement as some students flocked around the school gates to deliver their versions of the story in a bid to get their faces on the idiot’s lantern. She also recalls the crushing sense of disappointment when that miserable killjoy Principal Frank Samblebe turned up at the gates – possibly accompanied by police officers – to order the students inside and demand that the TV reporters leave the premises immediately.

It’s not entirely clear whether segments of this thwarted report were ever broadcast on Channel 9. Some former students recall that they saw the report in full on TV including the bit where Principal Samblebe turns up to ruin the party. Others swear blind that there was no such broadcast. A more intriguing claim from some Channel 9 viewers is that a quick teaser for the report was briefly shown on a morning news bulletin along with a promise of the full report which would be broadcast in the main evening bulletin – a promise which was never honoured.

Channel 9 themselves don’t seem to remember whether any such report was broadcast. Whilst a film canister labelled as The Westall Report was later unearthed in their archives, the canister was rather frustratingly found to be empty. This obviously sparked further suspicion that the tape had been seized by the government after they’d finished burning down farmer’s fields.

However, TV networks around the world were still notoriously sloppy at preserving archive material back in the 1960s during which period many truly historic broadcasts were wiped to make room for another episode of ‘Bill and Ben The Flowerpot Men’. If the UK networks couldn’t even be bothered to keep hold of their 27-hour broadcasts of the moon landings in 1969, you can see why an Australian network wouldn’t be too fussed about preserving a report of a school principal getting all stroppy.

The Assembly: Silence Imposed

If this story already feels a bit far out, I think that the weirdest element of all is yet to come. The manner in which the authorities and the school in particular allegedly responded to the UFO sighting was bordering on the hysterical. Just why was Westall High School so keen to close down any communication with the media?

Principal Frank Samblebe apparently made his feelings known in a school assembly held on the morning following the encounter. Assemblies were always a monumental waste of time back in my old school. In-between chanting The Lord’s Prayer and hearing updates about the latest Tuck Shop heist, our old headmaster Mr Uttley would often treat the whole school to a thought-provoking tale of morality for us all to ponder over for the rest of the day.

I can vaguely remember him telling us one particularly brutal parable about a father who found that his young daughter had been viciously attacked, whilst the beloved family dog loitered nearby with blood all over its mouth. Wasting no time in serving swift justice, the enraged father chopped off the dog’s head with an axe. It was only later that he realised his daughter had been attacked by a human intruder, and that the loyal pet dog had sustained injuries whilst chasing the intruder away and saving the daughter’s life.

That was it. That was the whole story. I’m not sure what valuable life lesson we were supposed to take away from this, other than maybe always take a moment to think things through before chopping off your pet dog’s head with an axe.

Some of the younger kids ran out of the hall in tears of wretched despair, to which the visibly annoyed headmaster responded by telling them all to grow up and stop acting like little babies. I think the chanting of The Lord’s Prayer came as something of a surprise relief that morning.

But if I thought my old school assemblies were bad, I’m not sure what I’d have made of the assembly held by Principal Frank Samblebe at Westall High School on April 7th 1966.

It had already been speculated that the school principal’s late arrival in the school yard the previous morning had been more down to fear than laziness. According to some observers, he seemed genuinely frightened about what was going on and refused to come outside until the UFO had gone. During the subsequent assembly, some students remember that the principal was flanked by mysterious men in dark suits, although not everyone shares the same memory.

But every witness agrees on the fact that Principal Samblebe wanted to make one thing clear: UFOs did not exist. Nobody had seen anything remotely strange the previous day, and if they thought they had, they were mistaken.

Even so, students were now forbidden from discussing the matter, and they would find themselves in deep trouble if they ever opened their mouths to the media. That went for teachers, too. In front of the entire school, Principal Samblebe reportedly announced that teachers would be at risk of losing their jobs if they ever mentioned the incident again.

Former student Susanne Savage remembers: “He didn’t want to hear any more about this nonsense. We were not to discuss it ever again.”

Just what was the school principal so scared of? It could have been that he felt the incident was distracting his students from their studies, and they should be knuckling down to serious work instead of trying to blag an interview on Channel 9. Or it could have been that he was acting on orders from a higher authority. Maybe it had something to do with those mysterious men in suits who may or may not have been present at the school assembly.

Threats and Intimidation

Andrew Greenwood certainly seemed to think so. After the science teacher had dared to disobey Principal Frank Samblebe by giving a very brief and not very insightful interview to the local press, Andrew claims that he was personally visited at home by two senior Royal Australian Air Force officers. Andrew was gruffly asked to recall his memories of the incident, but after he had furnished the officers with his tale, he was immediately told that he was mistaken about what he thought he had seen. Furthermore, one of the officers suggested that it sounded as if Mr Greenwood had been drunk on duty, and that he would be wise not to repeat his version of events to the media if he wanted to keep his job as a teacher.

Andrew Greenwood later stated: “Absolutely, I was threatened. I was told that I should not say anything about it.”

This wasn’t the only thing that was deeply troubling Andrew Greenwood. Let’s go back to the very first adult to have reportedly spotted the UFO. By the time Andrew had made it into the school yard that morning in pursuit of his over-excited science class, P.E teacher Miss Jeanette Muir was already busy trying to shepherd the kids back into the classrooms, and far away from the strange scary disc in the sky. However, when Andrew later approached his colleague to compare notes about what exactly they had both seen, he claims that Jeanette just simply clammed up and refused to talk about it.

Andrew also believes that there were at least three other teachers in the school yard on that morning who had witnessed the alien craft, but none of them were willing to discuss the matter with Andrew or even confirm that anything out of the ordinary had taken place.

Even some of the students were becoming oddly reticent. Andrew claims that shortly after the incident, he shared an in-depth conversation with one of the older pupils whose version of events closely mirrored what Andrew believed he had seen. Yet when Andrew approached the very same student a little later on, she refused to talk about anything at all, almost as if she had completely forgotten everything.

Could it be that teachers and students alike had been frightened into silence by the threats from Principal Frank Samblebe? It seems a bit unlikely that one little principal could wield such an icy grip of power over an entire school. I mean, I suppose the teachers may have been genuinely worried about losing their jobs, but you’re surely never gonna stop hundreds of schoolkids from gossiping behind the principal’s back about the day they saw a flying saucer. Not on this planet, anyway.

Perhaps the other witnesses had also been spooked by visits from mysterious men in uniforms. Many of them wouldn’t speak again of the Westall Encounter until decades later. Or maybe some of the students were just keen to try and forget what they thought they had witnessed.

During later interviews, a few of the former pupils claimed that they had found life very difficult in the weeks and months that followed, as their own family members refused to believe the wacky flying saucer story, and some of the students were beginning to question their own memories and their own sanity. They may have found it easier just to move on instead of regularly making themselves the targets of ridicule from their parents and siblings.

Whatever the reasoning, a peculiar silence fell over Clayton South for many years to follow.

Decades of Silence, Then a Resurgence

Well over 55 years later, we have still yet to hear any official explanation or even just a comment or acknowledgement from any government agency. The closest we’ve ever got to an official investigation was briefly conducted by The Victorian Flying Saucer Research Society but they uncovered little of value other than a burnt field which may have once contained a crop circle.

In more recent years, it’s been left to news channels and independent filmmakers to try and track down some of the original witnesses and shed new light on the story, but the mystery remains unsolved. Of particular note are the efforts of Canberra teacher and amateur investigator Shane Ryan who has been fascinated by the case for a couple of decades now, and helped put together the Australian documentary ‘Westall 1966: A Suburban UFO Mystery’ in 2010. Shane reckons that he’s been able to track down literally hundreds of witnesses from that April morning in 1966, and he was the one who organised the first of several reunions in which dozens of former students came together to remember how Principal Frank Samblebe really could be such a dick at times.

And yet I’m not sure his documentary or his extensive research has brought us any closer to an answer. Shane seems to think the attendees of Westall High School were let down by authorities who refused to deliver any explanations and attempted to put a muffler on the whole incident, but he also now feels that this may have been largely because the authorities were as stumped as everybody else.

The last we heard from Shane, he claimed that he may have tracked down one of the pilots of the Cessna planes that were attempting to ensnare the flying saucer, but all seems to have gone quiet on that front. Bearing in mind that the pilot was supposedly in a nursing home several years ago, I would imagine that Shane may need to get his skates on if he ever wants to secure that interview.

The Enduring Mystery

So this leaves us with a pretty perplexing puzzler in which hundreds of witnesses all apparently claim to have been part of one of the biggest mass sightings of a UFO in history, and yet many of them can’t seem to agree on the finer details – or even some of the broader details. And yet despite this huge number of witnesses who at least all agree that they saw something strange in the sky, the story was never widely reported at the time, and nobody in authority had much to say on the matter.

Andrew Greenwood is clearly still frustrated today. He says: “What really strikes me is that 55 years on, these people are very certain about what they saw. It just beggars belief that we’ve never had an official investigation. And flatly I think there has been a cover-up, I really do.”

Meanwhile former student Joy Tighe would be happy to just have someone in authority – or perhaps even anyone at all outside the circle of witnesses – believe her story instead of treating her like a fantasist. She recently revealed: “All we want is an answer. All we want is for someone to say to us, ‘Yes, we know that did happen that day. It was a very extraordinary experience, but something definitely did happen that day. It wasn’t in your imagination, you weren’t on drugs, you weren’t drunk, it happened.’”

I would certainly hope that over three hundred pupils at the same school weren’t all drunk or on drugs on the same Wednesday morning. I might expect that kind of behaviour from some of the teachers, but surely not the kids. I did initially suspect that somebody may have put something funny in the jam roly-poly and custard, but we can rule that out on the grounds that the incident happened in the morning and so the students wouldn’t have been fed yet.

It’s often been suggested that the whole thing was just a silly hoax which got out of hand, but the sheer volume of witnesses would seem to make that extremely unlikely. Surely at least one of them would have fessed up by now. I can’t see three hundred schoolkids managing to keep a secret for over fifty years, and besides, not all the witnesses were from the school anyway. So it looks like the Australian government must clearly have been attempting to cover up a visit from extraterrestrials all along.

The Alien Craft Theory

I know we’re usually very dismissive of potential alien encounters on Decoding The Unknown, and we prefer to find a more rational answer which doesn’t involve little green men preparing to assemble the mighty anal probe. And of course we’ll be doing exactly that in just a moment. But just for the record, I don’t honestly feel that this time round I have any real right to just dismiss the alien craft theory out of hand. Yes, it seems unlikely, but if several hundred people really did all recall seeing an intelligently controlled craft buzzing around in the sky several years before I was even born, who am I to say that they’re wrong?

I mean, there’s not much in the way of evidence other than witness accounts. It may have been a bit more useful if the alien craft had hovered into view at some point in the last fifteen years in which case we’d have all been able to enjoy watching about three hundred different videos of the damn thing on Instagram. But it didn’t.

A solitary photograph did eventually surface, but it wasn’t actually taken on the same day. This polaroid photograph of a supposed flying silver disc in the sky was apparently taken two days earlier, around ten miles away from Westall High School. The Victorian Flying Saucer Research Society has apparently examined the polaroid in great detail and confirmed it to be a genuine 1966 photograph which has been not digitally altered or tampered with in any way.

And some of the Westall Encounter witnesses claim that it bears a resemblance to what they saw for themselves just two days later. That’s terrific. But it’s still a pretty weak polaroid of a small silver blob in the sky.

It could be interpreted as anything from a slightly funky frisbee to a pan lid that’s just been lobbed in the air. I don’t think it counts as utterly compelling evidence.

Something that really bothers me is the presence or non-presence of those Cessna planes. It’s perhaps understandable in some way that hundreds of different witnesses may have slightly differing memories of the size, colour, and noise of the alien craft, but it’s harder to understand how some people saw five Cessna planes engaging in a game of cat-and-mouse for twenty minutes, whilst others don’t recall seeing any planes at all. I suppose it’s possible that the planes only came into view a little later and so were only ever seen by the small group of the more insubordinate kids who were refusing to head back into the school. But no official records of planes in the area have ever been found, and Moorabbin Airport insists that none of their craft were anywhere near the area.

You also would have thought that if anyone had been trying to intercept an alien spaceship, such a situation would have been handled by serious military craft rather than five light Cessna planes from the local airport, flown by five pilots who just happened to be hanging around before deciding to randomly chase the craft without requiring any permission to take off.

We’ll return to the alien craft theory in a moment or five, but there must surely be at least a couple of alternative theories to consider which are rooted in more Earthly origins?

The Weather Balloon Theory

That early subdued report from ‘The Age’ paper appeared to give the most widely-accepted answer when it glumly reported that the unidentified flying report was probably just a boring old weather balloon. As we mentioned earlier, the paper reported that The Weather Bureau had launched such a balloon used for meteorological research earlier that morning in the nearby town of Laverton. However, I’m not entirely sure where ‘The Age’ were getting their information from.

It certainly didn’t seem to be from The Weather Bureau. Simple weather balloons are hardly the sort of thing to be shrouded in secrecy, and a local launch would have been documented somewhere in the archives. But aside from that single mention in ‘The Age’ newspaper, nobody has since been able to find a scrap of evidence that a weather balloon really was launched from Laverton on that day.

That’s not to say with any certainty that it wasn’t a weather balloon, but there’s a noticeable lack of paper trail to suggest that it definitely was.

Project HIBAL: The Nuclear Balloon Hypothesis

Australian author, retired astronomer, and respected researcher of unidentified aerial phenomena Keith Basterfield went a little further with the balloon theory in 2014 when he was tasked with the mission of finding the most likely explanation for The Westall Encounter. And he dug pretty deep until he came up with what he believes to be the most convincing answer.

Keith reckons that it was a balloon of sorts – but no ordinary balloon. After sifting through the National Archives and making use of Freedom of Information laws, Keith discovered evidence of a joint program between the US and the Australian Department of Supply which ran between around 1960 and 1969 from Mildura in Victoria.

‘Project HIBAL’ – short for Project High-Altitude Balloons – was set up to monitor radiation levels in the atmosphere following the recent dodgy nuclear tests conducted by the British in Maralinga in South Australia. Each huge silver or grey balloon reached up to about 100 metres in diameter and carried a hefty 300-kilogram payload of snazzy atmospheric testing equipment. They were usually followed by a light aircraft – or a ‘chase plane’ – which tailed the balloon and remotely triggered its parachute via radio signals.

Keith uncovered documentation which revealed that four Project HIBAL balloons – including one named ‘Flight 292’ – were scheduled to be launched from Mildura on the day before The Westall Encounter, and yet any follow-up paperwork revealing the fate of Flight 292 appears to have gone missing. Although there’s a good 350 miles between Mildura and Clayton South, Keith’s hypothesis is that Flight 292 was a rogue nuclear balloon which was blown way off course and ended up drifting over Westall High School the very next day.

One expert revealed that it wasn’t too uncommon for HIBAL balloons to drift astray, with some of them ending up in Adelaide, Canberra, and even halfway to New Zealand. And the description of the silver balloon certainly sounds reasonably similar to how some witnesses described the UFO lurking over the school, whilst the potential presence of the light aircraft chasing the runaway balloon would explain why some witnesses felt sure that the object wasn’t entirely alone in the sky.

It sounds pretty compelling to me, but none of the witnesses are buying into it. They reckon that they know the difference between a floating balloon and an intelligently-controlled craft. This thing in the sky wasn’t just aimlessly floating adrift, it was buzzing around at remarkable speeds and often hovering in a perfectly controlled motionless position before shooting directly upwards into the air and zooming right back down again. There’s no way that a simple balloon would have generated quite so much excitement and fear from over 300 kids.

Secret Military Aircraft?

One of documentary-maker Shane Ryan’s alternative theories is that the UFO was some kind of secret experimental aircraft which belonged to either the Royal Australian Air Force or the United States Air Force. After all, this was during the height of the Cold War, whilst the Second World War was still a very recent memory. It could be the case that the military and the government were keen to silence the school, the media, and the witnesses, but not to hide any perceived threat of an alien visitation. They were more interested in hushing up the fact that one of their secret military experiments had just completely gone tits up and had almost crash landed right into a high school in broad daylight.

However, Australia’s aircraft industry had been scaled back considerably during the 1960s and it didn’t really have the capacity to produce pioneering new military aircraft. Of course, another nation such as the US or UK could have been testing new experimental aircraft in Australia. But any documents and designs for such craft would have long been declassified by now.

There is no known documentation for anything remotely assembling the description of the silver flying saucer darting around at incredible speeds in 1966. Besides, you wouldn’t really expect a top-secret military experiment to be taking place on a sunny Wednesday morning in a highly populated suburban area.

The Nylon Target Drogue Theory

There is one final rational theory which was initially put forward back in the day when it appeared in the letters pages of The Dandenong Journal during the two-week period when they were covering the story. A man who identified himself as a former navigator for The Royal Australian Air Force wrote into the publication to suggest that the object sounded not unlike a nylon target drogue. A bit like a wind sock, these target drogues were very much still used in training exercises at the time.

The target drogue would be towed along by one plane as target practice for other planes to chase and shoot at. Whilst The Royal Australian Air Force have never confirmed that a nylon target drogue was in operation over Clayton South at the time, the former navigator felt that they wouldn’t have felt the need to confirm or deny anything. “Why should they?”

he wrote. “They were probably carrying out a normal exercise and wouldn’t dream that anyone could take a drogue for a flying saucer.”

Brian Dunning from The Skeptoid Podcast is reasonably on board with this theory, and it would at least explain the perceived sight of a bizarre cat and mouse game taking place in the skies. However, Brian has a slightly different take on the matter as he believes The Westall Encounter could have been made up of two separate incidents occurring on the very same morning. Brian feels that the initial sighting at the school sounded very much like the students were just watching a simple weather balloon drift away slowly into the distance. But the small group who broke away to try and follow the disappearing balloon ended up seeing something else entirely – they now saw a bunch of planes chasing a nylon target drogue in a routine training exercise.

This does sound a little over-complicated to me, and it’s hard to believe that so much was going on in the clouds above Westall High School at the exact same time in the morning. We might as well throw in a hot air balloon, a shooting star, and an impromptu performance from the aerobatic display team ‘The Roulettes’ whilst we’re at it. And again, the witnesses again aren’t buying into any of this on the grounds that a nylon target drogue looks and behaves nothing like a hovering silver flying saucer. For now, it seems that many of the original witnesses are still convinced that they saw an alien spaceship on that morning, and you can shove your silly wind sock theories where the rings of Saturn don’t shine.

Embracing the Mystery: The UFO Park

The authorities may have had nothing much to say over the last 55 years, but at least the local council have recently decided to lean into the mystery and the intrigue. If you happen to be anywhere near The Grange Reserve today, you’ll find that it’s now home to a fun children’s play space which rides under the banner of Grange Reserve UFO Park. Launched in 2013, the park includes a massive UFO with funky twisty chutes stretching out of every corner, along with some super-cool alien wobble boards. Seriously, it looks pretty good.

If I was a bit younger and not stranded at the other end of the world, I’d take a look myself. Sod it, I might do it anyway.

It just feels a little surprising that a saga which has been shrouded in secrecy and radio silence for so many years is now suddenly the focal point of a local children’s park. We may not have any concrete answers to anything, but at least we’ve got a metal UFO to play inside. Maybe The Westall Encounter was just a particularly clever marketing teaser which took 47 years to reach the big reveal. Or maybe the alien craft theory is still the most compelling explanation we have to go on for now.

After all, we surely can’t just arrogantly dismiss the testimony of over 300 people who witnessed the incident first hand. Can we?

Questions About the Witnesses

I can’t help feeling just a little bit cynical over the fact that very few of those witnesses were adults. There were presumably several teachers in the school on that day, but the only teacher who’s ever been happy to talk about it at great length is Andrew Greenwood. No other staff members have ever corroborated any elements of his story – including the sighting of the craft, or the threats from grumpy Principal Frank Samblebe and the men in military uniforms.

Documentary-maker Shane Ryan has apparently managed to track down a few other adult witnesses not connected to the school – such as local residents and farm workers – but not very many at all. The overwhelming majority of witnesses to have spoken up about the incident were young kids.

I should quickly say that I’m not trying to suggest over 300 children are lying. I’m not even convinced that there really were 300 witnesses, but I’ll return to that thought in a second. But I do wonder if at least some of the former students – the relatively small number who turn up to school reunions and contribute to documentaries – could be caught up in something of a bandwagon effect.

I met up with an old schoolmate recently who I hadn’t seen for about 30 years. On my way to meet him, I was feeling a bit nervous about how we might not have anything of value to say to each other after all this time. But I needn’t have worried.

It was genuinely an amazing experience, as we literally just picked up from the exact same conversation we’d left hanging in the air in about 1993 and just carried on from there as if the intervening years had just been a summer dream. But he did say something that made me ponder over how our memories can sometimes cheat us. He asked me if I remembered the time that Mr Metcalfe’s belt snapped whilst he was on playground duty, and he ended up dashing red-faced back into the school with his trousers around his ankles whilst the entire school pretended to run for their lives in mock terror.

I remembered exactly what he was talking about. But it really wasn’t that remarkable. Mr Metcalfe’s belt did indeed snap, but his trousers never fell down.

He just took off the belt and popped back inside the school for a bit. By the end of the day, this incident had evolved into the story that my old mate seemed to remember, whilst by the end of the week it had evolved into an incident in which a trouser-less Mr Metcalfe was chased by a pack of angry wasps into the school duck pond. And it was a bit like the very first gig by The Sex Pistols.

Hundreds of people claim to have seen it happen, but only about 40 people were really there.

Memory, Time, and Inflation

Now, if you were one of the pupils in attendance at Westall High School on April 6th 1966, would you really want be one of the kids who was stuck in the classroom and missed the whole thing, or would you rather be one of the one kids who watched the whole incredible drama unfold and now has a story to tell? Again, I’m not suggesting that all the kids were just making shit up. It could also be the case that the story inflated in their own heads over time.

Some of them may have witnessed something slightly unusual if not exactly earth-shattering on that day, but this memory has grown into something else entirely over the years as the stories from other witnesses have been shared and absorbed. What may have started out as the sighting of something resembling a balloon gradually mutated into a sighting of a mighty silver disc which then mutated into the sighting of a frenetic battle between a UFO and several Cessna planes which then mutated into a sighting of an alien craft landing on a wooded heath and the occupants getting out to ask for directions to the nearest Pizza Haven.

Another point to bear in mind is that very few of the witness accounts were contemporary. Barely anyone spoke up about it at the time aside from science teacher Andrew Greenwood. It wasn’t until around 40 years later when people started making documentaries about it that other witnesses came together to hear each other’s stories and share their own memories of something that happened four decades earlier when they were young children.

We never get to hear of any new evidence, we just get to hear new memories long after the supposed event. These witness accounts may have been a lot more credible if they all closely matched up with each other, but the often significant contradictions in the recollections suggest that people are supposedly “remembering” entirely different versions of the events of that day. How can we judge which versions, if any, are close to the truth?

How Many Witnesses Were There Really?

The actual number of witnesses is also a bit of a grey area. It’s widely reported that there were over 300 witnesses either in the school yard on the Grange Reserve. But again, not everyone can agree.

Some say it was nearer 200. Some say it was less than a hundred. One interesting point is that if we go way back to the very first report on the story from The Dandenong Journal, the article indicates that “One teacher and several students” saw the alien craft.

That one teacher was presumably Andrew Greenwood, but there was no mention at all of Jeanette Muir or the other three teachers whom Andrew claimed were already on the scene. And just how many students is “several?” It could be 300.

It could be 50. It could be about seven. The number seemed to gradually grow over the years, until it finally reached about 300 which would be about half the school.

That itself sounds a little bit dubious. Would half of an entire school have been in a position where they could see the small segment of sky in which the UFO was hovering? And would so many teachers have allowed half the school to just get up from their desks and wander outside?

It could be that the only pupils in the yard on that morning were the ones taking P.E lessons, and the occupants of a couple of classrooms which had windows that just happened to be facing the right direction. Whilst The Westall Encounter is often made out to be one of the biggest mass sightings of a UFO in history, it’s more accurate to say that a completely unknown number of witnesses were present.

Re-examining the Cover-Up

And what of the shady actions of Principal Frank Samblebe and the Royal Australian Air Force who allegedly threatened pupils and students into silence? Well, it’s absolutely true that the principal held an assembly in which he asked students and teachers not to speak to the media, although it’s less clear if he went on a rant about how UFOs do not exist or threatened to fire teachers if they disobeyed him. Bearing in mind that Andrew Greenwood did just that with no consequences, it perhaps seems unlikely.

The principal himself gave a very brief interview to The Dandenong Journal explaining why he had banned pupils and students from talking to the press. He said: “The flood of visitors and phone calls from the Air Force down to the Flying Saucer Association have interrupted the children’s studies.” That might be considered a fair enough move from a school principal worried that his students were getting distracted by a circus sideshow.

He very probably wasn’t flanked by mysterious men in suits when he was giving his assembly speech.

And in fact, not many witnesses – aside from good old Andrew Greenwood – have much to say about being threatened by the Royal Australian Air Force. Whilst it’s often reported that Westall High School and The Grange Reserve were swarming with military figures in the immediate aftermath of the incident, there doesn’t seem to be any real evidence for this at all. Even if the government or military were keen to brush a sensitive secret under the carpet, it feels a bit unrealistic that they’d even attempt to silence 600 schoolkids by using bully-boy tactics.

And it’s not like a media blackout was ever imposed. Although most newspapers just didn’t seem very interested in the story, The Dandenong Journal ran with it for nearly a fortnight. Why would the government bother to threaten students and teachers from a school whilst allowing the local press to cheerfully bang on about UFOs for two weeks?

A Personal Verdict

I still think it’s very possible that Andrew Greenwood – who certainly seems to be the one person driving this story forward – saw something very unusual in the sky on that 1966 morning, along with a group of witnesses of undetermined size. And who knows, maybe it really was an alien craft from the distant planet of Flittertwinkle. We may never know for sure what it was that they saw.

If I was a betting man, I’d be inclined to plump for Keith Basterfield’s theory about the HIBAL balloons monitoring the radiation levels in the atmosphere. We know for sure that these balloons were being launched during this period. And they certainly would have attracted attention from people on the ground as they were absolutely huge and looked pretty unusual and futuristic.

We also know that the fate of one HIBAL balloon launched the previous day is now unknown as the paperwork has gone walkabout. And of course, the potential presence of the chase plane tailing the HIBAL balloon fits in with some recollections of Cessna planes circling the object, although I’m not sure if a chase plane would still have been tailing the balloon after it had drifted so far off course.

Of course, it might have been helpful if anybody had bothered to launch an official investigation at the time. The lack of any real action in this area has naturally fuelled all the theories of a government cover-up, but it seems as if the authorities just weren’t particularly worried about it, and now it’s too late to dig up a definitive explanation as we can’t trace all the documentation.

But I would still feel inclined to believe that the strange object in the sky was the missing Flight 292 from The HIBAL Project. Andrew Greenwood wouldn’t agree with me of course, but I suspect that he has been embellishing his own narrative for so long now that he’s unlikely to be swayed by anything that doesn’t quite fit in with the fantastical story he’s been sharing for decades. And I’m not sure he or any of the other witnesses even want to hear a definitive answer if it doesn’t involve either alien spaceships or a government cover-up of a sinister secret.

I mean, if the object was finally revealed to be a balloon, what would they even talk about at the next school reunion? They’d probably have to start completely misremembering that time Principal Frank Samblebe’s trousers fell down and he got chased into a duck pond by a swarm of evil sentient lawnmowers.

Sounds a bit far-fetched? You weren’t there, man.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Westall Encounter?

The Westall Encounter refers to a UFO sighting that occurred on April 6, 1966, at Westall High School in Clayton South, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. Approximately 300 witnesses, mostly students and some teachers, reported seeing a UFO hovering over the school and nearby Grange Reserve.

What did the witnesses describe seeing?

Witnesses described seeing an object that was widely described as a ‘cup turned upside down on a saucer,’ about twice the size of a car. Descriptions of its color varied, with some saying it was grey or silver and others claiming it had a purple hue. Some witnesses reported hearing a quiet vibrating or throbbing noise, while others said it was silent.

What was the official response to the Westall Encounter?

The official response was minimal. The Australian newspapers largely ignored the story, except for ‘The Dandenong Journal,’ which covered it for nearly two weeks. The Australian government and military denied any involvement or knowledge of the incident. The only official explanation suggested it might have been a weather balloon.

What theories have been proposed to explain the Westall Encounter?

Several theories have been proposed, including a government cover-up, a mass delusion, or a genuine UFO sighting. Alternative explanations include a weather balloon, a high-altitude balloon from Project HIBAL, a secret experimental aircraft, or a nylon target drogue used in military training exercises.

What happened at the Grange Reserve?

A group of students and local residents followed the UFO to the Grange Reserve, where they reported seeing it hover above the trees before disappearing. A perfect circular flattened imprint on the scorched grass was found, which some witnesses described as a crop circle.

What was the role of Principal Frank Samblebe?

Principal Frank Samblebe reportedly held an assembly the day after the sighting, during which he instructed students and teachers not to discuss the incident with the media. Some witnesses claim he was flanked by mysterious men in suits and threatened to fire teachers who spoke about the event.

What is Project HIBAL?

Project HIBAL was a joint program between the US and the Australian Department of Supply that involved launching high-altitude balloons to monitor radiation levels in the atmosphere. Keith Basterfield proposed that the UFO sighting could have been a rogue HIBAL balloon that drifted off course.

What is the current status of the Westall Encounter investigation?

No official investigation has been conducted, and the mystery remains unsolved. Efforts by news channels and independent filmmakers have tracked down witnesses, but no definitive explanation has been found. The local council has created a UFO-themed play area at the Grange Reserve.

What is the significance of the Westall Encounter?

The Westall Encounter is considered one of the most profound UFO sightings in Australia due to the large number of witnesses and the lack of a definitive explanation. It has fueled theories of government cover-ups and extraterrestrial visitation, making it a subject of ongoing interest and speculation.

What is the Grange Reserve UFO Park?

The Grange Reserve UFO Park is a children’s play area created by the local council, featuring a large UFO structure with twisty chutes and alien-themed play equipment. It was launched in 2013 and is located at the site of the reported UFO landing.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Westall Encounter: Australia’s Most Profound UFO Sighting
• Hero image source by WestallSC / openverse, by-sa.