Australia's Strangest Mysteries

by John Pinkney

  Triangle of Terror – on the Nullarbor

  In 1990 a 26-year-old South Australian man experienced a near-fatal encounter while crossing the Nullarbor Plain. Machinist Peter Ellacott was so shaken by his ordeal that he spent days re-creating it, with text and drawings, in a notebook. He presented the document to investigators from South Australia’s UFO research organisation.

  In his testimony – which received no media coverage – the young man recalled how three ‘hostile UFOs’ had played a deadly game of tag with him: ‘I was returning from holiday. It was just after night had fallen and I was driving down the Madura Pass,’ he wrote. ‘The sky was overcast, but stars were visible between the clouds.

  ‘In the distance I noticed what seemed to be the two lights of a car parked on the road ahead. But as I drew closer I saw they were hovering about five metres above the ground. I had a sudden rush of adrenaline as I realised this could be a UFO.

  ‘Summoning courage I stepped on the accelerator and drove straight at the lights. They seemed to respond immediately by rising to about 10 metres above the road. Then they sped away from my advancing car – pretty well matching my speed, but staying about 15 metres ahead.

  ’At that point I flashed my high beam at them – and in apparent response the two lights split into three. Experimentally I switched on my hazard lights – and almost immediately the three lights formed themselves into a triangle.

  ‘Thinking I had the upper hand, I drove slowly toward them again. But suddenly they flew at me with lightning speed. I panicked, did a 180-degree turn and headed west. The lights kept chasing me and in desperation to get away I reached almost 190 kilometres an hour. But I couldn’t shake them off.

  ’At this point I was so scared I began praying to God out loud – and just then, out of the distance, a big truck appeared. As it drew closer the triangle of lights vanished.

  ’At the local bar in Madura I told people what had happened. Not one person was sceptical. They all listened intently, then told me there’d been many similar incidents in that area. All I can feel now is relief that I escaped with my life.’

  * * *

  Mystery Substance Whitened a Queensland Town

  Scientists were unable to explain the origins of a crystalline substance which fell on Buderim, Queensland, in 1995. The inexplicable material whitened the roofs of houses and cars – and shrouded gardens to depth of several centimetres.

  Some observers believed the skyfall might be linked to a mysterious explosion which earlier had rocked the Sunshine Coast. A Buderim resident, Mrs Fay Stapleton, told me: ‘I was astonished when I woke on a warm morning and saw what looked like snow covering the grass and trees outside. My husband and I went out and scooped some of the stuff up. It felt like crystal in our hands. We thought at first that it might be linked to a buming-off on the canefields. But when you put it on your tongue it had no taste.

  An executive at Nambour’s sugar mill assured me the substance had no connection to cane.

  ‘The material was like little half-centimetre pieces of dandruff,’ another Buderim local, Jill Nulty, told me. ‘When I rubbed it between my fingers it felt glassy.’

  After several hours’ exposure to sunlight the baffling flakes melted away. ‘Some people gathered the stuff and put it in jars, but it simply evaporated,’ Faye Stapleton said.

  Equally mystifying was the explosion heard by thousands of Sunshine Coast residents shortly before the crystals fell. After worried householders rang TV and radio stations to report the bang, the Queensland government sent a Mines Department expert to investigate. When he found no evidence that there had even been an explosion, Weather Bureau meteorologists surmised that the din might have been caused by a plane breaking the sound barrier. But the RAAF scotched that theory, saying no aircraft had been flying in the area.

  ‘Crystalline material has been found in other parts of the world,’ said UFO investigator Colin Norris. ‘Many researchers believe it might be residue from an unknown craft’s exhaust system.’ But theories notwithstanding, the provenance of the vanishing crystals remains as deep a mystery as the glassy black ash on the Knowles family’s car.

  The Pilot and the Flying Pearl

  In 1932, while making the world’s first solo longdistance seaplane flight, the adventurer Sir Francis Chichester noticed ‘an exceedingly curious aerial vehicle’ moving toward him.

  At the time Chichester was travelling from New Zealand to Australia across the Tasman Sea. He assumed that he had encountered a new kind of airship, puzzlingly cocooned in white material that flashed in the sun.

  But three decades later, in his book The Lonely Sea and the Sky, he confessed his naivete. He was convinced by then that he had seen a UFO: long before the term was invented.

  In a violent overture to the drama, Chichester’s plane was pushed off-course by buffeting winds. Using the ocean’s surface and the crests of feathering waves as a guide to altitude he wrestled the aircraft through isolated storms for more than an hour, until he caught sight of clearer weather ahead. The welcome sight was accompanied by an awe-inspiring spectacle: a pattern of dazzling lights in the sky, 30 degrees west.

  ‘There were bright flashes like the glint of a heliograph...I saw a grey-white airship coming towards me...like an oblong pearl. Except for a cloud or two, there was nothing else in the sky. I looked around, sometimes catching a flash or glint, and twisted the plane to look at the airship more closely, but found it had disappeared. I screwed up my eyes, unable to believe, and twisted the seaplane this way and that, thinking that the airship must be hidden by a blind spot...but still I could not pick out anything,..

  ‘Then, out of some clouds to my front I saw another, or the same airship approaching. I watched it intently, determined not to look away for a fraction of a second. It grew closer until it was perhaps a mile away. Then it vanished...then it reappeared close to where it had vanished.

  ‘It drew closer and I could see the dull gleam of a light on its nose and back. It came on, but instead of increasing in size, it diminished as it approached. When it came quite near the airship became its own ghost. One second I could see through it and the next it had vanished into the flashes, and then they too had vanished. All this was many years before anyone spoke of UFOs. Whatever it was I saw in 1932 it seems very much like what people have come to call saucers.’

  Pro Hart and the ‘Alien Ship’

  Several months after completing an eerie painting of a domed craft, hovering in bushland, the celebrated Australian artist Pro Hart assured me it was based completely on fact [see photo insert].

  ‘A mate of mine photographed the UFO in Wilcannia [NSW]” Pro said. ‘It was standing stock-still above a dry lakebed.

  Unfortunately my friend was foolish enough to take his snapshot to the RAAF. A couple of officers confiscated it on the spot, for security reasons – as they’d done with quite a few such pictures taken around the area.

  ALIENS IN OILS The late Australian artist Pro Hart was incensed by the RAAF’s efforts to play down the numerous UFO sightings around Broken Hill. In 1985 a friend photographed a bell-shaped craft over bushland, and incautiously gave the picture to the Air Force – who promptly ‘lost’ it. Determined that a record of the sighting be preserved, Pro painted the scene from memory. It was hung in Broken Hill’s tourist office. Courtesy Pro Hart Art Sales, Broken Hill

  ‘However I’d studied the snap closely – and was able to paint the ball-bottomed ship from memory.

  For several months Pro displayed the picture of the arcane intruder in his public gallery. ‘But it stirred up so much fuss and curiosity that I passed it on to the Broken Hill tourist office, where they hung it,’ he recalled. ‘It was an appropriate place for the painting. UFOs had appeared so often in this area they were bidding to become a tourist attraction in their own right.

  ‘Around the same time as I completed the painting a bullet-shaped craft cruised over the army barracks at about 80 knots. And once, with friends I used a tel
escope to watch a group of saucer-shaped objects manoeuvring over Wilcannia. I’m convinced the RAAF and the Australian government know what these things are – and try, not too successfully to keep them a secret.’

  * * *

  __________

  *On 21 October 1978, pilot Frederick Valentich, 20, vanished over Bass Strait after reporting that a long object was orbiting his Cessna. The officially released transcript of Frederick’s final conversation with Melbourne Flight Service ends with his words, ‘That strange aircraft is hovering on top of me again. It’s...hovering and it’s not an aircraft...’ The microphone then remained open for 17 seconds, accompanied by ‘unidentifiable noises’, subsequently described as ‘metallic’.

  ** Descriptions of a ‘green light’ have characterised a number of abduction and attempted abduction reports. The Department of Transport’s official transcript records that just before he disappeared, Fred Valentich said, ‘...the thing is just orbiting on top of me. It’s got a green light and sort of metallic.’

  Almost exactly five years before the Valentich tragedy (19 October 1973) Captain Lawrence Coyne and three crew-members were flying in an army helicopter over Mansfield Ohio when a long object with a green light on its underside approached on an apparent collision course. The object shone the green light on the helicopter. A pyramid-shaped green glow lit up the cabin. The object itself also glowed green. USAF ground observers said the helicopter was apparently pulled upward at high speed in a cone of green light. Coyne’s altimeter showed his aircraft had risen from 1500 feet to 3000 feet in several seconds. The intruder vanished. Captain Coyne regained control and landed.

  The Dying Woman Who Was Cured by a Song

  Astonishing Powers

  In 1980 the bestselling Australian author Mary Durack suffered horrific head injuries in a car smash. Neurosurgeons gave her little hope of surviving. But then, a group of desert Aboriginals, some of whom had known her since childhood, met more than 4000 kilometres away to ‘sing’ her back to health. The cure worked. Mary astonished her doctors by sitting up and demanding food. She was another documented beneficiary of an Aboriginal gift thousands of years old: the power to heal – or kill – from a distance...

  MARY DURACK – OR DAME MARY as she eventually became – was an internationally successful writer. During her lifetime (1913-1994) she produced numerous books that awesomely depicted an elemental Australia: a continent of vast silent spaces, populated by a strange ancient people who were unalterably a part of its bushland and lonely deserts.

  From birth, Mary and her sister Elizabeth were brought up among the children of Aboriginal workers on their family’s remote properties in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia. In the stifling tin-roofed school their mother had established, they learned, alongside their friends, how to write, read and calculate. But as the paleskinned siblings grew older, the Aboriginal children began in return to introduce them to tribal ways and to secrets passed down through thousands of generations.

  During long walks on searing afternoons the young Duracks became acquainted with such wonders as the magic that stirred in rivers, in the mind’s capacity to ‘see’ across boundless distances and in the power that could be found in sacred bushland places.

  When the Durack girls became adults and offered their stories and paintings to the world it was sometimes said of them that they knew the Aboriginal soul more deeply than any other white Australian.

  THE RAVAGES of the road accident shocked even the Perth hospital’s seasoned emergency staff. The victim, quickly identified as Dame Mary Durack, had suffered such terrible trauma to the head that specialists doubted whether she could survive.

  Nevertheless, neurosurgeons settled her and prepared her with all possible speed for a delicate operation next morning.

  Radio stations were first with the news that one of Australia’s best-loved authors was facing death. One broadcast reached an isolated desert settlement more than 4000 kilometres from the hospital. An elder telephoned to offer help. The dying woman, he said, was ‘our’ Mary – the Mary who had been the classmate and friend of members of his tribe when they were schooled together at a cattle station in the Kimberley. They would ‘sing her better’, he promised. The songs would cure her – there was no question about that. And the music would work whether she heard it or not. But it would be best for her if she could hear her friends singing, over the telephone.

  Mary lay in a coma. The medical staff gravely doubted whether she would be capable of registering anything, ever again. But they, like most doctors and nursing staff, had recorded or been told of cases in which seemingly unreachable patients benefited in varying degrees when friends or relatives spoke to them. The attempted communication could do no harm, they decided. A nurse placed a telephone receiver on the table near the unconscious woman’s head.

  And the singing, scratchy and thinned by distance, began.

  The chanting continued for hours. Sometimes it was reminiscent of massed birds, twittering; sometimes of soughing waves. After the first 20 minutes Mary Durack began to stir. Another hour and her eyes were open, blinking – and at the end she was asking for a meal and for help to sit up and eat it. Neither the surgeons nor the nursing staff could believe what they were seeing. They were even more bewildered when their tests showed that the neurological damage no longer existed. The operation planned for the following morning would not be necessary.

  After a further series of tests Mary was released from hospital. One of her first acts was to thank her desert benefactors for saving her life. Several months later she began work on a new book, Sons of the Saddle, which would become another of her titles to reach the bestseller lists.

  ‘Healed’ by a River Stone

  Mary Durack was not the only non-Aboriginal Australian to be rescued from death by ‘bush magic’. During the 1990s I studied several reports about the allegedly curative properties of an assortment of smooth river stones, each known to their traditional owners as the Taipan’s Eye. These unexceptional-looking objects, their origins lost in antiquity, were owned by a North Queensland tribe, the Kuku Yalangi. The tribespeople sometimes made stones available to trusted locals stricken by severe illness.

  In 1992 a Kuku Yalangi elder offered a healing stone to a young friend, Roy Morris, then 18. The elder warned that someone in Roy’s family would become very sick – and that he must use the stone to make that person well again. The prediction was proved accurate when Roy’s mother, Gertrude Morris, was admitted to a Cairns hospital with kidney and lung failure. As she lay in intensive care, with only hours to live, Roy – driven more by desperation than belief – pressed the Taipan’s Eye into her hand. The following morning Gertrude (as Mary Durack had done earlier) sat up in bed, making a full recovery over the following week.

  From that time Gertrude Morris carried the stone in a bag around her neck – prepared to give it to anyone in sufficiently dire need.

  Most investigators find it difficult to ascribe healing powers to stones. But some have surmised that Aboriginals might somehow be able to channel their will (to heal or to kill) through inanimate objects.

  The Man Who Sent Mind-pictures

  The early settlers looked down on Aboriginals as a primitive people who, by failing to establish either crops or cities, had proved themselves undeserving of the immeasurable territories they occupied. But from early in the 20th century, a scattering of enlightened observers – both lay and academic – began to wonder whether it was we who might be the primitives.

  My friend, TV producer Ian Jones, was awestruck by his first-hand insight into the workings of two Aboriginal minds. In 1952, while still at university, Ian landed one of his first movie jobs, working in a modest capacity on Kangaroo. The picture, filmed in northern Australia, employed many Aboriginals. Early in the shooting, one of them, ‘George’, was mysteriously absent. Ian asked one of George’s fellow-tribesmen where he was.

  ‘He’s gone for a walk,’ the man said. ‘Back in a few days.�
� But a week later he volunteered, ‘George will be gone for a longer time. He’s fallen in a creekbed, long way away, and hurt his ankle. He’s walking very slowly now, to come back here.’ When Ian asked his informant how he could possibly know this, the man simply said, ‘I see him. We talk.’

  Ten days later George, in great pain, limped back into the moviemakers’ camp. The crew doctor checked his injury and put it in plaster. The ankle was broken.

  When Ian described this incident to me he said, ‘What struck me most was the calm casualness of it all. Nobody, including the man with the broken ankle, seemed to see anything unusual about two friends communicating – without telephones or any device other than their brains – across hundreds of miles.’

  A number of highly regarded anthropologists have opened their minds to what appear to be the extraordinary gifts of Australia’s Aboriginals. Telepathy, and the power to heal from a distance, are just two of these aptitudes. Dr Huston Smith, emeritus professor of psychology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said after an Antipodean visit: ‘I was in Australia lecturing at universities, but using my spare time to come in touch with the Aborigines, I did not, in that entire swing, meet an anthropologist who was not convinced that these people had telepathic capabilities.

  ‘They told me story after story of being with Aboriginals – and suddenly one would say, “I must go back to the tribe. So-and-so has died.” The anthropologists tended in general to accept that this was a normal human power – which had atrophied in materialistic Western society.’

  The pioneering anthropologist A.P. Elkin began in the 1930s to chronicle numerous cases he had observed in which Aboriginals demonstrated breathtaking mastery over matter and mind. In such works as Psychic Life of Australian Aborigines (1937) and Aboriginal Men of High Degree (1977) Elkin records that medicine men could summon up paranormal powers at will. By contrast, ‘ordinary Aboriginals’ tended more often to use these abilities at times of death or emergency within the tribe.