Farmer may hold UFO clue to 36-year Valentich plane mystery

This photograph was taken off Cape Otway 20 minutes before pilot Frederick Valentich went

This photograph was taken off Cape Otway 20 minutes before pilot Frederick Valentich went missing. Picture: Supplied Source: News Limited

INVESTIGATORS have shed new light on one of Australia’s greatest aviation mysteries.

Almost 36 years to the month that Victorian pilot Fred Valentich vanished without a trace, an independent researcher says there is evidence suggesting the 20-year-old’s Cessna was spotted in the sky over South Australia — attached to a UFO.

The Victorian UFO Action group wants help to identify a farmer near Adelaide who reportedly witnessed the 30m craft hovering over his property the morning after Mr Valentich went missing.

It is claimed the Cessna was stuck to the side of the craft, leaking oil. The farmer even scratched the plane’s registration number on to his tractor but never came forward with the information because he was ridiculed by the few friends he told.

The theory has sparked furious debate as the nation’s leading UFO investigators prepare for a national conference in Melbourne next month.

Frederick Valentich. Source: Supplied

Lead investigator George Simpson, one of the last people to see the plane in the sky, says the farmer, if still alive, might have information to solve the mystery.

He conceded there was no proof, but said it was the best new lead for a case that had intrigued Australians for decades. “It’s easy for some to dismiss, but there are corroborating stories confirming that there was a UFO near Adelaide at the time,” Mr Simpson said.

Mr Valentich had been on a routine cargo flight to King Island in October 1978 when he disappeared.

In his last conversation with air traffic control, he reported an object hovering in front of him and said it was “not an aircraft’’. It was the last thing Mr Valentich said before a strange metallic clicking sound was heard and the transmission stopped.

Extensive searches failed to find any trace of the plane or the pilot.

“This was an experienced pilot who should have been able to identify another aircraft but was clearly unable to,” Mr Simpson said.

Adding to the mystery, an amateur photo taken in the area that evening shows a dark unidentifiable shape in the sky.

Investigators are also trying to find a copy of Valentich’s final transmission that was originally aired on Melbourne radio station 3XY.

The Valentich case will be among a string of Aussie X-files to be discussed when the Victorian UFO Action group hosts its “Age of Reason” conference on September 6.

For more information, go to the website vufoa.com

aaron.langmaid@news.com.au

“Strange days, strange tales” – a Valentich connection?

On Monday 21 October 2013 35 years will have passed since young pilot Frederick Valentich disappeared on a flight to King Island in Bass Strait. It is one of the major aviation mysteries of Australia. The following article has been prepared to see if there is anyone out there who can help with information pertinent to the story revealed here.

Background can be found via the following link: http://theozfiles.blogspot.com.au/2012/06/valentich-file-revealed.html

Consider this as a preliminary progress report on some strange days and strange tales in the lives of some UFO researchers pursuing a possible resolution of one of the stranger folios from the OZ Files – the Australian UFO story.

“The Unexplained Files” series on the Discovery Science channel debut in September 2013 featuring a good recreation of the extraordinary 1978 Valentich mystery. My friend George Simpson (based in Melbourne Victoria) was instrumental in the excellent accounting of this story on the programme.

The disappearance of young pilot Frederick Valentich and the Cessna (VH – DSJ, Delta Sierra Juliet) he was flying over Bass Strait and the UFO encounter he described in his conversation with Melbourne Air Service controller Steve Robey are all extraordinary aspects of one of the major aviation mysteries of Australia.

The lost Cessna VH-DSJphotographed at Essendon Airport in 1974(VUFOA/Victorian plane mechanic archive)

The Roy Manifold photo showing a possible UFO

The programme featured Steve Robey obviously still distressed about the disappearance of Valentich. Frederick’s younger brother Richard gave the family’s dimension to the story. Both these elements remind us that a disturbing and tragic element still haunts this mystery. George Simpson interviewed Roy Manifold who took some intriguing photos at the time and locality of Valentich’s departure from the Australian mainland on route to King Island in Bass Strait. There were many other interesting aspects described in the programme.

George Simpson

Roy Manifold discussing his photos with George Simpson

In the wake of the release of the long awaited official Valentich files from the Australian government’s Department of Transport during June 2012, (largely through the persistence of Keith Basterfield) which provided information for a wide range of conflicting theories, the Discovery Science programme reminds us that the disappearance of Frederick Valentich and the Cessna is still a mystery for which we have no certain answers.

The Department of Transport "Valentich" file V116/783/1047

Dr. Richard Haines who investigated the case and authored a book on it – “Melbourne Episode – case study of a missing pilot” (1987) facilitated the airing of the actual strange sound heard at the end of Frederick Valentich's last radio conversation with Steve Robey. I heard the tape back in 1984 when I stayed with Dr. Haines in California.

It was Richard Haines comment in the programme that the sound might be of contact between the Cessna plane (DSJ) and the UFO Valentich had been describing in the six minute conversation that caused me to suddenly reconsider a very strange story I had come across back in early 1995.

HIGH STRANGENESS IN COONABARABRAN

The "Coonabarabran Times" of Coonabarabran, in north west country New South Wales, Australia, in its November 17th, 1994 issue, carried brief details of an apparent close encounter with a diamond shaped UFO near ground level on November 15th, 1994, on the Mendooran road to the south of the town. With the assistance of local police, I was able to interview the 4 principal witnesses to this apparent close encounter.

The Mendooran Road UFO was initially seen as a large light source hovering over the nearby road. An approaching car appeared to cause the object to start moving. and slowly move closer to a farm house, where the 4 adults witnesses were observing it. At its closest point all witnesses described it as a massive object - a diamond shape with lights around the edges, with window like structures within the body of it. There was a very bright yellow light inside it. It appeared to be at tree height and of massive dimensions. As the 4 adults left the house verandah to go closer to the silent object, which seemed to be only 300 yards away and slowly passing along side the house area, it suddenly accelerated at a phenomenal speed and disappeared in the distance. After the object had passed by there was a tremendous high pitched engine noise, almost like a sonic wave.

The details were so striking I decided to do an on site investigation. Further still I had long known that Coonabarabran seemed to be a haven for UFO stories. There were many reports that my friend Robb Tilley and I would investigate over the days we were in the area.Here are a few of them. On the same section of Mendooran Road of the November 1994 incident a driver coming from Sydney to Coonabarabran had an encounter in which the radio and other electrical items in the car were affected.I spoke with a gentleman who witnessed another massive diamond shaped object while timber cutting near Binaway, back in about 1979. His companion allegedly took a photograph, which my informant indicates he saw. It apparently showed a silvery shape with sections without the observed lights. The informant states he was told the army took the photo and he believes that his companion ended up in a mental home. He implied it was due to the photo incident.

AN ASTRONOMER'S UFO SIGHTING

The Sydney Morning Herald of January 11, 1995 ran an article featuring a UFO sighting by Dr. John Dawe, the manager of the Sidings Spring Observatory, near Coonabarabran. Dr. Dawe is an internationally respected astronomer. The article stated that many months ago he was driving back from Sydney with his wife and daughter.

"We were going up a hill near Merriwa, at the top of the Hunter, when I happened to look up at the sky. There was a uniform, grey cloud cover, but suddenly something seemed to detach itself, hover for a while, then fall vertically very quickly below the brow of the hill. I yelled an expletive, which made everyone take notice. My wife saw the same thing, but by the time we got to the top we couldn't see anything."My tentative explanation was that it was a weather balloon. But it was grey, rather than silver, and was elliptical horizontally, not vertically."Dr. Dawe was quoted as saying it was "classic stuff.""It was something I still cannot explain. But I am 99.99 per cent certain it was nothing alien."

Dr. Dawe did not respond to a letter I sent him, but another Coonabarabran astronomer told me that he felt Dr. Dawe's report was only unexplained because unfortunately Dr. Dawe could not stick around immediately after the sighting and thoroughly investigate the matter. The sentiment expressed was that an explanation would have been forthcoming had a prompt investigation occurred.

LAURIE'S STORY FROM A SOUTH AUSTRALIAN FARMERABOUT A UFO & A CESSNA THE DAY AFTER THE VALENTICH DISAPPEARANCE

So there were many stories to look into in the area. One of the area witnesses told me that I should seek out Laurie a local businessman, who had a lot of UFO stories to tell that he himself had heard.

One story was utterly startling and unbelievable, but it was apparently connected to the Valentich mystery, initially told to me by one of the Coonabarabran witnesses who had heard it through Laurie. Others encouraged us to ask Laurie about other stories. We did both, but the story in question stood out.

Laurie told us he had heard the story directly from a South Australian farmer who had bought a property in the north west of New South Wales. The farmer had come into his business and the talk had strayed onto UFOs. He shared with Laurie an experience he had on his South Australian property on the day following the disappearance of Frederick Valentich.

The farmer said he was harvesting lucerne when he heard a loud screeching sound coming from the harvester. He thought it might have been a bearing, so he uncoupled the harvester from the tractor’s power drive, and jumped off and went back to have a look. The farmer was trying to work out the source of the continuing noise, when he became aware that he was in shadow. He looked up and saw he was directly underneath a large “saucer” shaped object, and going by the size of his harvester, he estimated it to be about 30 metres across (approximately 90 feet). The loud screeching noise continued. From directly underneath the object the farmer reportedly could see two concentric outer rings or bands that were counter rotational and were operating at different speeds. One went very fast, so fast that you had to blink to see that it was moving. The other one was moving very slowly in the opposite direction. There were two small protuberances that the farmer took to be rudders, and two large holes, one had ‘shimmering heat’ coming out, the other was shooting small flames.

The farmer began to think there was something horribly wrong with this huge object and that it might crash down on him. So he ran to get out from under it. He got the impression that one of object’s engines had stopped working.

As he moved away the farmer looked back at the object which he could now see edge on. It had a large dome on top, and what looked like a black weather seal along the base of the dome structure. He then noticed what looked like a “church door with a curved top, but no windows or handles were visible.”

He then told Laurie the most unusual thing was that he saw the massive object had a Cessna stuck to the outside of it – “the whole aircraft.” It was flat up against the side of the object with it’s tail hanging down. Laurie said he was not sure whether the farmer said there was engine oil running down the outside of the Cessna but he could clearly see the plane’s registration markings.

He found a nail and scratched the plane’s registration number into the paint of his tractor. According to Laurie, the farmer said the object – “the saucer” – still accompanied by the screeching sound then flew away over a ridge in the direction of a nearby Army range.

The farmer said to Laurie he told no one about what happened. He went into town later in the day. One of his neighbours saw him and apparently said, “I see you are doing some more crop spreading”. He said no, why do you say that. The neighbour said, “I saw the Cessna today up in your top paddock.” The farmer told Laurie, he replied to his neighbour, “There’s no Cessna in my top paddock.” The neighbour insisted, “Yes there is, I was up near there, I saw it there today.” The farmer said, “That’s interesting, I’ll have a look when I get home.”He went up to the top paddock and saw no plane, but he did see three tyre marks and some tracks from a plane. He followed the tracks to where they ended, and there was “a pool of ’flamin’ engine oil” on the ground. I recorded the story from Laurie on two separate occasions, one over the phone in January 1995 and face to face in Coonabarabran one month later in the presence of my friend Robb Tilley. Laurie was impressed with the story. Robb and I simply did not know what to think. Getting further information proved elusive.

As I had lived through the Valentich mystery unfolding at the time in 1978 and had written extensively about the research and investigation of the extraordinary events I was acutely sensitive to the bizarre and strange aspects. I also had contact with Guido Valentich, Frederick’s father and I knew that he had been exposed to various claims about what had happened to his son. He even helped me investigate one claim, which ultimately ended in no real resolution, just another unverifiable claim. Sadly Guido Valentich passed away without a definitive answer to his son’s disappearance.

With Laurie’s account from the farmer I had yet another extraordinarily bizarre and unbelievable claim. Laurie told me the farmer returned on another occasion with the Cessna’s registration number. It was DSJ the number of Valentich’s Cessna. This in itself was not convincing for me because that information was widely reported at the time of the plane’s disappearance.

I did not want to burden the Valentich family or authorities with yet another unverified story. The biggest problem the story had for me then was that Laurie couldn’t recollect the farmer’s name. He told me he had written all this down in notes, but he had not been able to find them. I stayed in touch with Laurie for a while but despite attempts to come up with a name, without his notes we couldn’t progress the investigation unless we had a vast amount time and resources available. I circulated a brief account on Paranet (a favoured research internet facility) at the time but nothing came of it. So the story stayed a sleeper until Dr. Haines comments on the Discovery Science programme “The Unexplained Files.” I immediately accessed my notes and tapes and began to evaluate whether the considerably improved resources of the internet, social media and other resources would now allow another attempt at getting to the heart of the story. Sadly, I quickly learnt that Laurie had past away about 7 years ago.

I contacted George Simpson and shared the story with him. We both agreed that despite the bizarre nature of the story we should try to see if we could track down anyone who had knowledge of the story and see if we could get a name for the farmer. We have since been tracking down all sorts of clues.

THE BIZARRE STORY OF A NSW FARMER

We have even talked with a farmer who described a similar experience - a UFO over his property with a Cessna attached to it on the day following the Valentich disappearance! His is a story with bizarre additions to the tale told to Laurie. It seems this farmer may not have talked to Laurie in Coonabarabran. He was not from South Australia and his property was in southern central News South Wales near the Victorian border! The former farmer, from southern New South Wales, talks of a part of his property he gave over to UFOs that would land from time to time. This became an obsession that his neighbours became aware of. He even tried crude strategies to catch the UFOs.

Then allegedly, there was the day and night the UFO came with a Cessna plane attached to the side of it. The story this farmer told included a visit to his homestead by a pilot, accompanied by a strange person, seeking aviation oil, a strange story of a pilot “forced” to fly a Cessna away from the area and an impossible tale of an object from the plane left in a tree stump as a clue, the farmer thought, that the pilot and “the plane” had been there, hoping to be found. The farmer thought this was a flight recorder “black box,” but this certainly could not be, as civilian Cessna aircraft, such as VH-DSJ, did not have one. That connection and other factors make this former NSW farmer’s story both troubling and problematic. His former neighbour, who I have spoken to, does not confirm details attributed to them, but does confirm curious UFO stories all coming from the former farmer, some seemingly predating October 1978 – the period the Valentich disappearance occurred in.Had he heard the story of the South Australian farmer and made it his own, absorbing it into his own UFO obsessions? There are perhaps curious echoes with other diverse tales of Valentich returning from Spanish, Russian and American sources, none which convinced me upon trying to thoroughly examined the dubious evidence for them.

We have not yet found the South Australian farmer who spoke with Laurie. All our investigations to date have supported that Laurie had a great memory, but unfortunately in this case when it came to names we need his notes and these may be lost to us. We hope not. Our investigations continue as we go through a number of different names and clues. We hope that our investigation or someone reading this might have facts that will stand up to scrutiny and give us the possibility of figuring out if this wild tale is the stuff of UFO high strangeness and an answer to the Valentich mystery, or just another ultimately unverified story. Hopefully time will tell and we will be able to report further on this fascinating or beguiling story.

CAN YOU HELP?

We owe it to the Valentich family to find out. Contact George Simpson or me if you have any information that might help in our investigation at aufornvic@optusnet.com.au or billozfiles@tpg.com.au

Some things are certain in our wild ride – these are strange days, strange tales. Far less certain is whether we are trying to resolve a genuine story, strange echoes of one, or a tall tale from down under – a strange kind of bush “urban legend” in the making. So far it has been an intense, intriguing and occasionally frustrating investigation of a tale from the OZ files.

As the news of the day pulsed along the once seemingly unthinkable pathways of the information industry — boots on the ground in Gaza, slide show updates on Mila Kunis’s pregnancy — adherents of an earlier future gathered at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. The occasion was the annual conference of the Mutual Unidentified Flying Objects Network, which, in accordance with this year’s theme, “UFOs and the Media,” was focused not on the ephemera of the news cycle but rather on the eternalities of what several in attendance called “the biggest single story in history,” i.e., the existence of extraterrestrial life on Earth and the cover-up of that presence by the United States government, the corporate structure, and their oblivious and/or sold-out lackeys in the mainstream press.

While this year’s symposium attracted a reported 400 people, this was a far cry from the thousands who attended the MUFON conference in the late 1970s, after Close Encounters of the Third Kind introduced extraterrestrials to the mainstream moviegoer. That was at a time when a lot of people actually believed that these mysterious things from the sky represented the biggest single thing in history. Since then, despite the recent astronomical findings of the so-called “Goldilocks zone” that postulates sentient life is possible throughout the galaxy, ufology has apparently lost its grip on the public imagination, and has been demoted to a neo-cult status. For the populace at large space is no longer the place. Not that this mattered to those gathered at Cherry Hill. Used to marginalization, they were resolved to keep watching the skies.

**Photo: L. Clarke/© Corbis. All Rights Reserved.**

The tone was set by keynote speaker George Knapp, an Emmy-winning reporter for KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, perhaps the best known above-ground correspondent on the ET beat, if you don’t count people like C.J. Jung, who late in life developed a deep interest in what is called “the phenomena.” A debonair raconteur, Knapp spoke of the ridicule he’d received from his MSM colleagues. “I’ll always be the UFO guy,” Knapp related with wry j’accuse, recalling how after doing a story about alleged alien medical procedures, he found himself labeled “the Grand Mullah in the Church of Cosmic Proctology.” The point wasn’t whether UFOs were “real” or a mass hallucination. The news was that people kept seeing them. Yet, according to the gatekeepers of supposed reality, Knapp said, “you, me, and everyone in this room are just a bunch of nuts.”

This was fun, especially when Knapp began talking about Area 51, “the world’s best known top secret base.” In 1989, Knapp broke the story of Robert Lazar, a then 30-year-old scientist who claimed to have worked the remote military facility in the Nevada desert. Lazar’s epic account of how the US armed forces were “reverse engineering” alien technology from crashed and captured flying saucers has become a cornerstone of the late stage UFO narrative. As soon as Lazar opened his mouth, “the meme was on the loose,” Knapp said, resulting in many books, movies, and Area 51-inspired product campaigns accompanied by theme music from the X-Files.

**Photo: null/© Corbis. All Rights Reserved.**

In the context of today’s ever-narrowing attention span, there was only one drawback to this 25-year-old story: It was 25 years old.

Not that the old was out of place in this crowd. MUFON has been around for 45 years and the average age of those who ponied up $239 for the conference was way past that. Many of the presenters, most of them long-established figures on the scene (Stanton Friedman, the 79-year-old widely acknowledged dean of the field, had to cancel owing to a mild heart attack) were equally venerable, as were most of the subjects they discussed. Much talk focused on the genre’s greatest hits: the Betty and Barney Hill abduction account (1961), the Lonnie Zamora/Socorro, New Mexico sighting (1973), the Rendlesham Forest incident in the U.K. (1980), and, of course, Roswell, circa 1947.

As noted, it wasn’t always this way. In another post-A bomb time ufology seemed a wholly appropriate response to a newer, bigger, and far more frightening world. Long before the appearance of Ezekiel’s wheel, people knew something was up there, and now that we’d fired off this nuclear bottle rocket capable of killing millions, the watchers had come in for a closer look. Suddenly palpable millennialism gave impetus to a number of so-called “ufo religions” ranging from the Honorable Elijah Muhammad’s talk of the liberating “mother plane” to ex-sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology. It also enabled a breed of typically American loner “independent researchers.” These were the free-thinking, often highly competitive (later highly paranoid) individuals who drove their vehicles into the middle of the desert, looked up into the vast firmament decided that, for better or worse, there had to be another world beyond this one. The fact that the UFO issue represented the first time a large segment of population felt the then-trusted government was withholding the truth from the public only whetted the frisson of the hunt.

It is true that very little beyond a shadow of a doubt forensic proof of alien presence has come to light over the years, but there are a number of subsidiary reasons for the seeming twilight of the UFO moment. With voracious proliferation of vampires, New World Order conspiracies, and the unprecedented rise of evangelical Christianity, the simple flying disc from far, far away has become a quaint, almost nostalgic specter. The saucer may have been the post-war generation’s signifier of the strange, but even versions of the unknown outlive their usefulness. The end of the era may have commenced with William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which located the drama of the unknown inside the claustrophobic cyberspace accessible to the common keyboardist. Instead of the far-flung wonder to the universe, much of what falls under the rubric of contemporary ufology has become deeply interiorized, resigned to the viscous psych-sexual abduction phenomena described and popularized by people like Budd Hopkins, Whitley Strieber, and John Mack. It is a narrative bothers many “hard science” ufologists. “I’m trying to evaluate these sightings,” said Tom Deuley, a no nonsense retired Naval officer, former NSA employee and a leading MUFON investigator for 37 years. “When you bring in crop circles, time-traveling and abductions, these things are hard to quantify.”

It made you wonder where, short of a landing on the White House lawn, ufology could possibly go from here. Case in point was the presentation of Steven Bassett, this year’s winner of the “Excellence in Ufology” award (MUFON executive director Jan Harzan called it “the biggie’). The first registered Washington lobbyist advocating the position that humanity is not alone in the universe, Bassett organized last year’s “Citizen’s Hearing” which enlisted several ex-congress people including former Alaska Governor Mike Gravel to hear testimony on what is now being called “exopolitics” so as to avoid being saddled by the ufology brand. People like astronaut Edgar Mitchell, who walked on the moon, made the case for extraterrestrial visitation. The hope is that the mock hearings would lead to the real thing, which, Bassett was certain would “blow the lid off the Truth Embargo on the alien question that has existed since Roswell.”

After his presentation, I spoke with Bassett, an ardent former business consultant in his middle 60s who described the Disclosure quest as “my life, now.” Victory was inevitable, he thought, saying, “the Catholic Church’s attempt to suppress the Copernican revolution was a doomed enterprise. Now we’re talking about something far more profound than that … when the government tries to contain the reality of the galaxy, that is a task that is Herculean and ultimately can not succeed.” Once the alien presence was acknowledged, humanity would take a meaningful step into “maturity,” Bassett contended.

**Photo: Paul Trent/© Corbis. All Rights Reserved.**

There was a manic, almost desperate optimism to Bassett’s Disclosure dream that had to be respected. Yet, many conference attendees had their doubts about the program. Bassett had just finished telling me that the Roswell crash probably resulted from the mid-air collision of two alien craft in a thunder storm. This happened, he said, because these were relatively primitive ships. Bassett said he “liked” this explanation. Other people did too. But what happened when the no-doubt heavily redacted “truth” came out and said something different? Wasn’t much of ufology about speculation, peering into the abyss? Besides, several said, what made Bassett so certain the government could end “the Truth Embargo” even if they wanted to? Perhaps the aliens, more powerful and smarter than our lowly bunch, did not want to be Disclosed. Maybe they liked things just the way they are, skulking around the shadowy mythland of the subconscious they’ve inhabited all these eons. Offering a smile, Bassett said. “Well, I guess you’ll just have to ask them about that.”

None of this, however, was a reason to close the books on flying saucers. This would be impossible, since if you happened to have laid eyes on something you sincerely believed to be a UFO, it tends to stick. I will never be free of that cold winter’s night in 1989 when, along with my wife, I saw a saucer-shaped object fly down the East River and soar beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. The way the craft seemed to coquettishly blink its lights as if to say, "even here, I appear, and then disappear" told me, that against all rationality, this particular interface with the ineffable was meant for me.

These are the things you talk about with people like H. Dyke N. Spear at UFO conferences. As George Knapp said, the subject matter does “tend to attract those whose elevator does not got all the way to top,” but you’ll never see Dyke Spear in a tinfoil hat. Past 80, he remained a man of the world, still practicing divorce law in West Hartford, Connecticut. Once he represented the famous featherweight boxing champion Willie Pep. “It was like Willie’s fifth divorce,” Spear related. “He said, relax, this is an easy case. Just give her five rooms of furniture and a fur coat. That’s what they always get.” Asked whether he took any abuse from friends and family about attending UFO conferences, Dyke laughed. “What are they going to tell me, I don’t know what I know?”

Fernando Garces-Soto, a wry, 60-ish Colombian-born music producer from Miami and fellow witness, was taking it more personally. “I’m spending a $1,000 to come to this. That’s a lot of money for the same old stories. This rehash, and more rehash. Probably next year I’ll spend another $1,000. What choice do I have?” Fernando exclaimed, finding the existential humor of the situation. “I’m obsessed,” he sighed. “I’m all messed up.”