Beyond Area 51

by Mack Maloney

  What the Children Know

  Possibly the most telling piece of evidence that something very unusual happens on a regular basis in the Aksai Chin region comes from another news report from the area, relayed by many media sources, concerning a drawing contest for young children held at a local school.

  Told one day to draw things from everyday life, more than half the students drew strange objects in the sky or coming out of the mountains.

  According to the locals, the children not only draw these things all the time, but many of them know what to look for and even where and when to look.

  Speaking on his website, UFO author and researcher David Icke confirms such things while telling of his forays into the area.

  He, too, had heard of the drawings being made by the local children and that the illustrations depicted craft that looked like domed UFOs.

  But he points out that these drawings are very important because they came from kids who are pretty much isolated from the rest of the world—and in this case, that’s a good thing.

  “Their villages were very simple,” Icke says on his website of his visit to Aksai Chin. “We were few days’ walk away from tourist resorts where TV and things of that nature were common. These kids were not watching American TV and had no books or comics to get references from.”

  The Colorado Connection

  Why would there be so many UFO reports in this remote part of the world?

  Surprisingly (or maybe not), we go back to San Luis Valley researcher Christopher O’Brien’s words about what happens over those areas of the Earth where tectonic plates come in contact with each other. As O’Brien told us previously, unusual tectonic conditions seem to go hand in hand with lots of UFO sightings—and according to a United States Geological Survey website (www.pubs.usgs.gov): the Himalayas feature some of the most dramatic plate-tectonic forces in the world, with the Eurasian plate and the Indian plate continuously converging on one another.

  These conditions create what some UFO researchers believe are open areas deep underground where UFOs could hide and operate from.

  Back to the Mystery Model

  Recent reports from the Aksai Chin area say more and more Indian military personnel on the ground are coming forward to say they’re now seeing UFOs on a daily basis.

  Indian helicopter pilots have been complaining about sophisticated electronic jamming going on in the area. Some Indian Air Force pilots are also reporting seeing strange flying objects above the Himalayas around the Chinese border. Also, YouTube is filled with videos of alleged UFOs flying over the entire Himalayan region.

  So, there’s little doubt something highly unusual has been happening for some time in the Aksai Chin region.

  Which brings us back to the scale replica of Aksai Chin at Huangyangtan.

  Again speaking on his website, David Icke asks the question that’s on everyone’s mind: “I am intrigued as to… why the Chinese would map the area so accurately in a huge reproduction scale model,” he said. “Although the model at Huangyangtan is huge, it would not be practical for troop movement studies in this day and age with GPS and satellites. Why then would they build this thing?”

  That’s what makes this all so puzzling. We don’t have a clue—at least not yet.

  So, we’re only left to consider this: Is it odd that this insanely isolated area, this place where a very strange war was fought, where Earth’s crust is probably thicker than anywhere else on the planet, where kids draw UFOs as part of their everyday life and where people have been seeing UFOs for hundreds of years, is the same place the Chinese chose to build an elaborate model of?

  Yes, it is odd.

  Make that very odd.

  17

  UFOs over Oz

  The Haunted Highway

  On January 20, 1988, Fay Knowles and her three sons set out from the city of Perth in Western Australia, heading for Melbourne in the east.

  Their mode of transportation was a 1984 Ford sedan. Their route took them across the Nullarbor Plain.

  Connecting South and Western Australia, the Nullarbor Plain runs for more than one thousand miles east to west. It’s mostly flat, arid desert, and as its Latin name suggests, it’s practically treeless. The Eyre Highway, which features the longest stretch of road in the world (ninety miles without a bend or curve), is its main highway. But despite the excellent condition of this and other roadways, crossing the Nullarbor Plain can be hazardous. Run out of gas or have a mechanical problem and your car will likely join the many abandoned vehicles that can be found along the way. At the very least you’ll have a long walk ahead of you.

  But the Nullarbor Plain is known for something even more unpleasant than breakdowns in the middle of nowhere.

  Some of the most frightening UFO incidents ever reported have happened here—as the Knowles family was about to find out.

  Driving through the Nullarbor at night, when it was cooler, the Knowles had proceeded on their trip incident-free.

  But just before four in the morning, the family saw a bright light on the road ahead of them. Sean Knowles, twenty-one, was driving. They were somewhere between the towns of Madura and Mundrabilla.

  Everyone in the car assumed the light was just a truck coming in the opposite direction. But then the light began moving erratically. It would disappear only to reappear an instant later, much closer to the Knowles’s car. After this happened a few times, Sean floored the accelerator. The light disappeared—only to wind up behind them.

  Sean hit the gas again, this time to get away. But an instant later, the bright light was in front of them again.

  The family finally realized this thing was a solid flying object—and it was now blinding them with its intense bright light. Still, Sean was able to turn the car 180 degrees, intent on speeding away in the opposite direction.

  But the object stayed with them. Sean performed another U-turn, nearly colliding with a car coming in the opposite direction, but again the object persisted in chasing them.

  Then the family heard a loud thud on the roof of their car. Something had landed there! Though panic-stricken, Mrs. Knowles rolled down her window and reached up to the roof, only to feel something warm and spongy. When she pulled her hand back inside, it was covered with hot black soot. An instant later, the car was filled with a black mist that stunk of rotting flesh, accompanied by a painful high-pitched sound. Most bizarre of all, the family’s voices became lower in pitch and their speech started to slow down.

  With all four members beyond terrified, the object began lifting their car off the roadway. It carried the Ford for a short distance before slamming it back down to the pavement with such force that one of its tires blew out.

  Somehow, Sean managed to pull to the side of the road, where the family scrambled out and hid in some bushes. They watched as the object hovered around their disabled car for a few moments before taking off at tremendous speed. After staying hidden for another fifteen minutes, the family summoned the courage to put on their spare tire and flee to the nearby town of Mundrabilla.

  Luckily for the Knowles family, they met three witnesses who’d also seen the strange object out on Eyre Highway. Returning to the scene of the incident, one witness saw skid marks and located the Ford’s blown-out tire. When police questioned the family members, they found them severely traumatized. They were convinced something truly bizarre had happened to them.

  But theirs was not an isolated case. So many cars have been chased by flying objects along the Nullarbor Plain that one local government erected a sign warning motorists to “Beware of the UFOs.”

  But why here? What is it about the Nullarbor Plain that attracts this sort of nasty UFO?

  Someone’s Watching Woomera

  Not far from the eastern end of the Nullarbor is the Woomera Test Range.

  Though its name has changed several times over the years, it was here in the 1950s that the British military, in dire need of wide-open spaces, came to test its newly developed atomic weapons.<
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  It was a controversial decision. Not only would parts of Woomera be inundated with radioactive fallout as a result of the tests, but the site itself also had been previously inhabited by Australian Aborigines, all of whom had to be relocated against their wishes. This led to many disputes with the Australian government.

  But one thing was not in dispute: As soon as the British nuclear blasts commenced, UFOs appeared over Woomera and the Nullarbor Plain in disturbing numbers—and they’ve maintained a presence there ever since.

  These strange flying objects did more than just suddenly materialize above the Australian Outback, though. No sooner did the British begin their bomb trials than the UFOs began interfering with the nuclear testing itself.

  Carefully planned detonations had to be postponed, sometimes for days, because electricity throughout the Woomera test site would suddenly go dead whenever the UFOs appeared overhead. (The nearby town of Woomera, for which the site was named, often found itself blacked out for hours as well, again due to UFO activity.) Similar blackouts happened over American ICBM bases in the 1960s and 1970s as well as in the former Soviet Union during the 1980s. Again, for reasons no one can explain, UFOs seem very interested in mankind’s nuclear weapons capability.

  Because the Woomera nuke tests were recorded by movie cameras, reports say UFOs haunting the test range were caught many times on film. On one occasion, more than fifteen thousand feet of film was said to have been taken of UFOs crisscrossing the test area. But while the film was promptly sent to Washington, DC, for analysis, what happened to it after that is unknown.

  UFO activity over the area ebbed and flowed over the next few decades, but it never went away completely. Then another top-secret facility was built at Woomera. Called Joint Defense Facility Nurrungar, it was operated by both Australia and the United States not for testing nukes but as a ground station for space-based surveillance platforms. In other words, it controlled spy satellites.

  But UFOs soon showed a high interest in this facility as well. In fact, from the time operations began at Nurrungar in 1969, UFO activity in the area skyrocketed back to the same intensity as the days of British nuclear testing of the fifties.

  When the Nurrungar base closed in 1999, many of its operations were moved 350 miles to the north, to another classified facility called Pine Gap. This place had seen its share of UFO incidents, too—but like a lot of UFO stories from Oz, these were anything but typical.

  Weirdness at Dead Center

  Pine Gap is considered one of the most secret places in the world.

  Located in a small valley at the foot of the MacDonnell Ranges, the facility (officially named Joint Defense Facility Pine Gap) is about twelve miles east of Alice Springs, a small town considered the geographic dead center of Australia. Like a lot of noncoastal Down Under, the surrounding area is hot, desolate and inhospitable.

  Originally opened in 1970, Pine Gap has grown steadily over the years. Most often described as a satellite control and processing station, the facility these days is basically a larger, more powerful version of Nurrungar. Like that shuttered facility, Pine Gap is operated jointly by Australia and the United States, and, frankly, it’s from here that America’s newest fleet of spy satellites is run. And many of these satellites are designed to eavesdrop not just on other nations but also on targeted individuals as well.

  Pine Gap consists of a large complex that includes up to eighteen giant igloo-like radomes, each hiding an extremely powerful antenna. About a thousand employees of the National Security Agency and the CIA work here, and what they do is considered so secret that the airspace around the facility has been declared a no-fly zone—the only such flight restriction in all of Australia.

  A massive security fence surrounds Pine Gap, and its perimeter is patrolled both by American and Australian guards. Meanwhile, security inside is said to be so severe that some have claimed personnel are actually hypnotized to ensure they will not talk about what goes on there.

  This last point is interesting, because there are many rumors that more things go on at Pine Gap than just controlling spy satellites.

  Death Ray Hotel?

  One frequent claim about the Pine Gap base is that a borehole some five miles deep has been drilled below the facility to house a massive underground antenna. This giant antenna might be used for emitting very low-frequency radio signals to the U.S. military or for some kind of mysterious subsurface research or, as some people assert, to tune a gigantic “wave field” around our planet.

  Other rumored deep-secret projects at Pine Gap include ongoing high-energy, high-voltage research; construction of a “death ray” plasma cannon; electromagnetic propulsion tests and even specialized “power broadcasts” that are able to fuel U.S. Navy submarines thousands of miles away. A large nuclear reactor is also alleged to be in place at the facility, hidden deep within an underground chamber.

  Even stranger, some locals say enormous amounts of food arrive at Pine Gap by airplane from the United States on a weekly basis, while other eyewitnesses insist they’ve seen air transports unloading things like furniture, high-end appliances and other provisions that one would ordinarily expect to see in a plush hotel.

  This has led to speculation that an entire city exists somewhere beneath the facility.

  Whose UFOs Are They?

  It’s no great surprise, then, that Pine Gap has been the site of many UFO incidents, just as with Nurrungar and Woomera before it.

  But here’s the twist. Few if any of these stories depict unidentified objects buzzing the facility or interfering with its functions. Just the opposite. Many of these reports come from people claiming to have seen UFOs operating out of Pine Gap.

  Some of the reports include the following:

  In 1975, passengers on a plane passing just outside Pine Gap’s restricted airspace say they saw a large white object take off from a hidden tunnel on the base and fly off to the northwest.

  In 1980, two members of the Northern Territory police, who were taking part in a search for a missing Alice Springs child, saw a trio of bathtub-shaped objects appear over Pine Gap. The strange aircraft then disappeared, one at a time, into an opening in a hillside deep within the base.

  In 1989, three hunters were camped out for the night near Pine Gap. Just before dawn, the trio saw a large camouflaged door hidden in the side of a hill inside the base suddenly open. A large disc flew out of this opening and climbed into the sky at fantastic speed. Once the flying machine disappeared, the door quickly closed behind it.

  But if these are UFOs, then whose UFOs are they?

  More than a few locals say they’ve observed discs about thirty feet in diameter being unloaded from large U.S. cargo planes at the airport serving Pine Gap.

  So the question is, are UFOs somehow assembled at Pine Gap and flown from there? Could they be spy craft? Drones made to look like UFOs?

  Like many things having to do with secret bases, it’s impossible to tell.

  But whatever the case, flying objects of uncertain origin are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to strange things happening around Pine Gap.

  Close Encounters of the Aussie Kind

  According to a number of media sources, something really spectacular happened at the Pine Gap facility in 1984.

  The story comes from five UFO enthusiasts who were reportedly tipped off by someone in the know that, on a certain night, a major event was going to take place at the base. With this in mind, the group was able to get within several miles of Pine Gap, and indeed, they claimed to have witnessed something literally out of this world.

  Using binoculars, they first saw a number of people inside the base who were wearing coveralls and assembling out in the open.

  Suddenly an intense beam of gold light appeared from the center of the base. This beam was at least fifteen feet wide and shot straight up into the night sky. Clouds began forming around this beam, staying in place despite a steady wind blowing in the area.

  The beam s
tarted pulsing, causing the clouds to take on the appearance of massive smoke rings. Oddly, on seeing this, the witnesses reported, they all became extremely nauseated.

  Then the witnesses saw five objects approaching the base from the south, flying at about one thousand feet. Four of these objects were described by the witnesses as star-shaped and arranged in a diamond formation. The fifth object, which was shaped like a cylinder, was following about two miles behind.

  Once over the facility, the four star-shaped objects took up positions at each corner of the base. Then the cylindrical object arrived, lowering itself to about five hundred feet off the ground. Light beams began flashing all over the base and between the five objects, a display that lasted several minutes.

  Then one of the small star-shaped objects landed at the northern end of the base. It remained there for nearly twenty minutes before taking off and resuming its original position.

  Now the intense beam of gold light reappeared and one of the small star-shaped objects began to orbit it, as if examining it. As this was going on, the strange clouds returned and surrounded the gold beam once again.

  After a few minutes of this, the gold beam disappeared for good and the weird smoke rings blew away. The cylinder-shaped vehicle rose in altitude as the star-shaped objects went back to their original diamond-shaped formation.

  Then as a group, the five objects roared off to the south, vanishing in a matter of seconds.

  CE3—The Sequel

  Exactly what happened at Pine Gap that night in 1984? For those familiar with the 1977 Steven Spielberg movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it seems the only thing missing from the witnesses’ account was composer John Williams’s five-tone motif that has become almost as famous as the movie itself.

  But… strangely enough, a strikingly similar event was reported at Pine Gap in 1973, eleven years earlier.

  In this incident, a man camping a few miles from the base saw a vertical shaft of bright blue light suddenly appear from the middle of the facility. Grabbing his binoculars, he spotted a strange-looking object hovering about a thousand feet above the base. Circular and gray with a dome on top, this object was enormous in size—more than five hundred feet in diameter by the witness’s estimation.