Australia's Strangest Mysteries

by John Pinkney

  Faye Knowles and her sons quit the stranded Ford (from whose roof their suitcases had vanished) and ran into roadside scrub to hide. The object continued to hover above the scrub for about 30 minutes, before moving away. Eventually the young men ventured cautiously back to the car, where they hastily replaced the bizarrely tattered tyre. So anxious were they to escape the scene that they abandoned the jack and the burst tyre by the roadside.

  Faye Knowles’s right hand, with which she had touched the ‘suction pad’ on the roof, was now red, swollen and intensely painful. Sean took the wheel and, keeping an apprehensive eye on the sky, drove 12 kilometres to the Mundrabilla roadhouse. The first person they met there was a Melbourne truckdriver, Graham Henley.

  ‘I was totally convinced they’d had a terrifying experience,’ he subsequently told me. ‘Their plain fear and the dog cowering in the car were evidence enough. The lady was crying uncontrollably and one of the young blokes could barely speak. But there were a few other things that prompted me to accept their word. A fellow-driver had told me the day before that a glowing light had chased him along the highway, so I assumed the family had met with the same or a similar object.

  ‘I also looked at the car. The dents on the roof were consistent with something having clamped onto the vehicle. There’s no way the car was rolled, because the front end was not misaligned, nor was there the damage you’d get from rolling. The first theory the average person might have about the black dust (and quite a few did offer it later on) was that the dust came from overheated brakes. I felt the sooty material and there was no way it was brake dust – which only gets on the wheels, anyway, and not the roof. I’ve been around the racing scene and I know what brake dust is like. This was a fine silicon-type material, like powdered glass. It had an amazing feel to it.’

  The Knowles were intent on putting as much distance as they could between themselves and Mundrabilla. They drove 600 kilometres to Ceduna police station, across the border in South Australia.

  Senior Sergeant Jim Furnell, in company with Sergeant Fred Longley, gave the family sandwiches and cups of strong tea before interviewing them for two-and-a-half hours. Meanwhile, other police examined the car. An Adelaide Crime Scene detective, who happened to be visiting the station, took a sample of the strange black dust for forensic analysis.

  Sergeant Longley told Victoria’s Sun News-Pictorial: ‘Mrs Knowles and her sons were obviously very distressed when they walked in here at lunchtime yesterday. They were in a terrible state, white-faced and shaking, even five hours after the incident. They’ve definitely seen something. The woman was thankful just to be alive. Something happened out there. Their car, even after being driven all that way, still had the black ash over it, and on the inside, too. There’s no soil like that out there, only sand. And there’s another witness. The truckdriver who was originally followed by the object went on to Perth and reported his experience to their media and police officers.’

  The Knowles family claimed that a UFO snatched up their car, then dropped it so violently that a tyre, pictured here, exploded.

  The day after the family arrived at Ceduna, Perth police went to the site where the attempted abduction allegedly occurred. They found evidence that ‘seemed strongly to support’ the Knowles’ story: the tattered tyre and the hastily abandoned jack still lay by the roadside. Skidmarks were visible where Faye Knowles said she had sharply U-turned in a final attempt to escape the descending object. Thick black ash, covering the road’s edges, bore human footprints leading into the scrub.

  The encounter made headline news. Within 24 hours, reports suggested that there had been other precedents for the ‘failed kidnap’. These were additional to the testimonies (noted above) of the truckdriver and of the crews aboard tuna boats Empress Lady and Monica:

  Perth newspaper journalists checked their files and were reminded that in January 1985 two traindrivers had claimed they were followed across the Nullarbor by a mysterious light. They said it drained their train of energy, bringing it to a halt.

  In July 1984, in the Adelaide Hills – last bumps on the map before the Nullarbor – farmers discovered the corpses of four cows, holes drilled into their skulls and the brains removed. Police found burns and egg-shaped podmarks in the soil. Investigators also discovered crushed rocks, burned trees and dozens of dead birds.

  Pat Gildea, a spokesman for Victoria’s UFO Research Society, announced that a prominent Launceston businessman had approached the organisation on 16 December 1987 to describe an alarming encounter two days earlier. The man – who for professional reasons wished to remain anonymous – was driving his white Mercedes along a Tasmanian country road at about 10.30 pm when an ‘egg-shaped object’ landed on the bitumen in front of him. As it did so, his lights and engine died. ‘He panicked and ran to take cover in bushes,’ Pat Gildea said. ‘The car was dragged toward the light before the oval-shaped object flew off. The man returned to his car to find that it was covered in grey ash.’

  Ron Warman, a 56-year-old Brisbane man, said that in October 1987 he and four friends were driving along a lonely road between Sansonvale and Petrie ‘when an object came down from the sky’. He added, ‘It was white with a yellow centre and came straight at the windscreen. It left no evidence – and no one was game to wind down the windows and look up.’

  Debunkers were having none of this. Research physicist Glen Moore of Wollongong University believed the object that bothered the Knowles family was probably a carbonaceous meteorite: ‘There’s the possibility of these people feeling a very considerable shock if the meteorite entered the earth’s atmosphere above them. It’s quite possible it broke up in the atmosphere and material fell on the car.’

  Professor Peter Schwerdtfeger, head of meteorology at Adelaide’s Flinders University, preferred a severe storm as the explanation: ‘My best guess is that it was an atmospheric electrical phenomenon manifested in the form of dry lightning – in other words there was no rain. If somebody happens to be in one of these electrical disturbances, miles from anywhere, it’s going to be a pretty thrilling, if not eerie, sensation.’

  Alan Brunt, retired head of South Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, surmised that the Knowles family had spotted the rising sun: ‘Conditions on the day were perfect for far horizon mirages – and what happened following the sighting could probably be explained by panic. It’s possible Mrs Knowles turned her car over without really knowing what had happened, landing back on the wheels.’ (Ceduna police inspected the car and found no roof damage consistent with it having rolled.)

  For a payment of $5000 the Seven Network secured exclusive rights to the Knowles story. The outcome delighted sceptics everywhere. Channel 7 Adelaide’s chief-of-staff Frank Pangallo sent the car to Australian Mineral Development Laboratories, whose director Monty Luke tested the dust in time for the telecast. He said it was consistent with dust from brake linings and from material found on other vehicles.

  Faye Knowles expressed disgust with the television station. ‘They’re calling us liars,’ she said in an interview. ‘That’s not true. What we know happened to us did happen to us.’ Frank Pangallo was at pains to defuse her anger. ‘I’ve spent a bloody hour trying to explain to them they’re not being made out to be liars,’ he told Melbourne’s Sunday Press. ‘I just said to them, “Look, you’ve got it confused. The smoke in the car was caused by your burst tyre. There’s nothing saying you didn’t see the object, because it’s been witnessed by other people on the road...and from the tuna trawler at Port Lincoln...”’

  Black Dust ‘Very Strange’: Monash Scientist

  In the weeks that followed, several Australian and American scientists obtained samples of the black dust from Faye Knowles’s car. They conducted slow, deliberative investigations – and were intrigued by what they found.

  One analyst with whom I spoke was Alf Honan of the Earth Sciences department at Melbourne’s Monash University. He told me: ‘The dust contains very large amounts of chlorine, which I consid
er extremely odd. I’ve used an electron microprobe to take scanning microphotographs of the material.

  ‘It’s definitely not brake dust. Nor is it a material that occurs naturally in our environment. The dust is man-made particle material of some kind. It isn’t salt from the lakes around the area – and there’s no indication the family had swimming pool chemicals in the car. Nothing in these samples gives me the eeries, but at the same time it’s very strange.’

  AUSTRALIAN RESEARCHERS also sent samples to the United States where they were tested by NASA scientist Dr Richard Haines. He reported that the material contained potassium, oxygen, silicon and carbon, together with traces of the synthetically produced radioactive chemical astatine. When magnified 5000 times some of these particles showed signs of potential radiation: a possible explanation for Faye Knowles’s painfully swollen hand.

  Residue cases of the Nullarbor kind are relatively common. In her book Skycrash, the British investigator Jenny Randies describes ‘glittering powder’ that was recovered on 5 July 1978 from a sedan ‘attacked’ by a strange craft in Taos, New Mexico. She writes, ‘Many witnesses saw the craft hovering above the vehicle. The powdery residue it left behind was collected in a jar and sent to the Schoenfeld Laboratory for analysis. The material was found to be organic in nature, with characteristics similar to teflon. Spectrometer tests also found potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron and titanium.’ Randies adds that similar dust has been found on the hides of mutilated cattle: ‘The coats fluoresced under ultraviolet light, as if they had been chemically marked. When samples of hair were analysed they were found to have on them a powder which was high in potassium and magnesium.’

  Predictably, numerous learned but ignorant sceptics, far from the scene, dismissed the Knowles family’s story as a probable hoax. Equally foreseeably, these intellectually lazy debunkers based their cavalier assumptions on the Knowles case alone. Characteristically, few ‘experts’ showed interest in the long history of such ‘attempted abductions’ on our continent.

  Like numerous Australian investigators I have spent much of my career studying such history. My interviews and correspondence with witnesses confirm that events similar to those described by the Knowles family had occurred years before January 1988 – and had continued to occur for years afterward.

  Below, from my records of interviews, are several significant accounts:

  Two Men Vanish in a WA Desert

  In 1977 a motorist disappeared without trace in Western Australia’s Great Sandy Desert, near the Northern Territory border. Two years later a second motorist went missing in the same area – under almost identical circumstances. Police officially reported bizarre, mirror-image phenomena associated with both cases.

  I learned about the missing men in a circuitous way. In 1983 Monty Barr, a Kununurra truckdriver, contacted me to say that a ‘gigantic blue craft’ had buzzed his vehicle shortly after he delivered a prefabricated building to Balgo Mission Aboriginal reserve.

  Monty described the object as ‘making a loud whirring noise and having a bright ring of interior lights, visible on the photographic negative’. He said, ‘I managed to get one decent flash photograph of the UFO. But then it began to descend – and my mates, Wayne Trembath and Brett Rogers, urged that we get out of there. I didn’t need any persuading. We had the nasty feeling the thing might be coming to get us.’

  The men told me that their encounter occurred near the Northern Territory border, in an area where two motorists had vanished several years earlier. I had heard nothing of these disappearances – and my subsequent research revealed that the cases had received little or no press coverage beyond the remote region where they happened.

  I checked the facts with James O’Kenny, editor of the Kimberley Echo:

  ‘Both cases were totally baffling. The first happened in 1977. A bloke staying at a motel in the area failed to report in. Sergeant Tom Corker, the Kununurra policeman at that time, set up a search. The man’s car was found abandoned at Golden Gate Creek.

  ‘Tom brought in blacktrackers. Everyone was amazed when the Aboriginals, who can detect the minutest human trace, could find no marks or footprints leading from the car. And it got odder. We learned that on the night the man had vanished, some Main Roads employees in a bush camp had reported seeing strange lights in the sky.

  ‘The second event, in 1979, was very similar. Another broken-down vehicle was found on the same road. The driver had simply gone – no clues, no footprints. He was never found.

  ‘On the night of that second disappearance, some tribal Aboriginals, camped on the road, said they’d seen spirit lights. The UFO reports around this place are constant. Everyone knows there’s something very weird going on.’

  Sergeant Ian Williamson, then in charge of Kununurra police station, backed editor O’Kenny’s statement. ‘Those motorists are a puzzle all right. Their cases are on the Missing Persons File in Perth – but it seems unlikely they’ll ever be solved.

  And Jim O’Kenny is correct – the reports in this area never stop. Only today a schoolteacher and a taxi-driver independently came to us to say they’d seen a large bright light moving in a way no aircraft does. Both people said it was bobbing up and down in the sky.’

  FIVE YEARS BEFORE the world had heard of the Knowles family, many people around Kununurra were talking and writing about bizarre aerial objects that had swooped on their cars. A typical account came from Damien Monck, a plant operator.

  ‘I was driving along the Darwin-Broome highway, about 70 kilometres from Kununurra. Suddenly a brightly lit round object appeared and began to keep pace with the car.

  UFO KIDNAP CLAIM In 1988 Mrs Faye Knowles and her three adult sons said that a gigantic eggcup-shaped object had lifted their Ford Telstar from the Eyre Highway on the Nullarbor. The Knowles’ alleged experience was not isolated. Around the same time two captains reported that an eggcup-shaped craft had swooped on their fishing vessels. © Seven Network (Operations) Ltd

  ‘My passengers, Karen Newton and her seven-year-old son James, were as worried as I was. We were all getting bad vibes – the feeling that the object was menacing us. I trod on the accelerator, hoping to leave the thing behind. Then at last, to our relief, it seemed to lose interest.’

  Karen and James watched it vanish behind hills, about 30 kilometres outside Kununurra.

  Pursuit on a Rural Road

  Seven years before the Nullarbor case was internationally reported, Robyn White of Kelso, Queensland, endured a comparably terrifying experience.

  ‘I was driving to Toowoomba from Jondaryn. At around 4.30 am a brilliantly bright object appeared from nowhere and swooped down at my ute. Then it ascended and hovered.

  ‘I was scared out of my wits, but also tremendously curious. I can hardly believe, now, that I did it – but I was crazy enough to get out and take a closer look.

  ‘Everything I saw in those moments has remained engraved on my mind. The first thing I noticed was that there was no bounce-back or reflection of light. The ute had a shiny tailgate, but no light appeared in it. The object itself was brilliantly bright, but its light seemed to be self-contained. The trees close to it cast no shadows.

  ‘Feeling very uneasy now, 1 got back into the car and drove away. To my horror I saw in the rear-view mirror that the thing was following me. I kept increasing my speed, but every time, the object sped up too. At this point I got the powerful feeling that it was intelligently controlled.

  At last I saw Toowoomba ahead. As 1 approached the built-up area, the object vanished – leaving me shaken but intensely relieved.’

  ‘My Car Was Repeatedly Lifted’

  Unarguably, the most frightening aspect of the Knowles’ Nullarbor ordeal was the way their Ford was ‘snatched up’ from the road, then dropped back to earth with great force. It was not the only time this phenomenon reportedly has occurred in Australia. Ken J. Smith of Yass, NSW, wrote to me to describe a similarly disturbing experience.

  ‘It happened on June 13
1993. I’m not superstitious, but it turned out to be the unpleasantest day of my life. I was driving from Gulgong to Gunning. At dusk I stopped at a little place called Black Creek to eat some sandwiches and drink coffee from my thermos.

  ‘It was dark when I finished the meal. As I drove on I noticed that something was clinging to my glasses and obscuring my view of the road. I stopped to wipe the lenses clean – and that’s when the horrors began. As I sat there on that deserted road I heard a sound like wire scratching against metal.* Then I felt something grip the rear of the car and lift it up.

  ‘I could see nothing through the rear window – but something, whatever it was, lifted the car’s rear four times before dropping it back on the road. I backed out of there and drove away as fast as I could.

  A little further on I felt a shiver run right through me. I knew I was being watched. At that point the road went into a culvert and swung to the right. That’s when I saw a bright green object, about the size of a fox’s eye** hovering about 45 centimetres off the ground. I have very bright 150-watt driving lights – and if there’d been anything more than that tiny light I’d have seen it easily.

  ‘But the only thing visible was this green object, shining brilliantly in the darkness. As I drove, it kept moving to the left of the car – and my sense of being watched persisted. I do a lot of spotlighting, and if an animal turns its head you lose sight of it. But this weird light stayed in view all the time and I was in very little doubt that it was relating closely to me.

  ‘I felt enormous relief several kilometres on when the light abruptly vanished. I’ve never been able to shake off the memory of that episode – or my conviction that the green light was somehow connected to the lifting and dropping of my car.’