by John Pinkney
‘I was 10 at the time and my brother was 14. We were living in a farmhouse on Return Creek in Mount Garnet. Dad was the local undertaker. One night about 9 pm Mum called out that someone was coming to see us. We all went to the kitchen. Through the window we saw what looked like a pair of car lights approaching. But as they got closer we realised they weren’t part of a car. They were floating globes, filled with bright light, that seemed to be taking a strong interest in our house.
‘While we watched the lights stopped, turned and spun right through a wire fence. As they passed we saw leaves and tree branches shake, as if a strong wind was blowing.
‘Dad grabbed his gun and rushed outside, but by that time the lights were moving quickly away across a ploughed field. Next day our neighbour said the lights had flown up to his house, just as they’d done to ours, before veering away.
‘We were all certain we’d been visited by something with a mind behind it - but none of us could ever work out why it had turned up in our remote patch of the world.’
Mystery of the 20 Queensland Deaths
Between 1981 and 1985 aviation experts were baffled by a long run of fatal plane crashes near Charleville, in Queensland’s lonely outback.
Some locals became convinced there was a jinx on the area, whose bleak red landscape of stunted mulga and bloodwood trees had become a graveyard for 20 people. R.M. Seymour, then director of the Federal Department of Transport, said, ‘We cannot find any specific trend to account for these crashes.’
The department’s investigators were particularly puzzled by the downing, in unexplained circumstances, of a Super King Air turboprop northwest of Charleville in August 1983. The pilot and his 11 oilrigger passengers were killed.
First to notice the more bizarre aspects of the crash was Inspector Keith Cumner of Charleville police. ‘The wreckage had barely disturbed the ground,’ he said. ‘It looked as though something had just picked it up and put it there.’
By contrast the bodies of all 12 men were horrifically mutilated, as if crushed by enormous pressure. The plane’s wings were bent upward at an outlandish angle, indicating that massive force had been applied to them. One Department of Transport investigator commented, ‘The two wings were lifted up as though they’d tried to clap hands over the top of the fuselage. This means the wings must have been bent under a gravitational force of about 8 gs. The average person blacks out at about 31/2 gs. The plane must have been spinning at two turns per second - 21/2 times faster than an F-111 can roll.’
The only theory experts could offer was that the Super King Air went into a sudden steep dive in the dark, after climbing for some unknown reason, to a possible 20,000 feet.
Local residents immediately offered a range of theories about the crash. One farmer rang a radio station to say the plane might have been struck by a ‘meteorite shower’ over Queensland that night. The Department of Meteorology confirmed that there had been a meteorite display, but it was hundreds of kilometres above the earth.
Several witnesses reported that they saw a huge white flare in the moonless sky at about the time of the crash.
The reports and comments associated with this case have long engendered in me a sense of deja-vu.
Consider Inspector Cumner’s statement: ‘The wreckage had barely disturbed the ground. It looked as though something had just picked it up and put it there.’ An eerily similar comment was made about Captain Thomas Mantell’s F-51 Mustang which on 7 January 1948 crashed from 30,000 feet after he pursued a UFO over Godman Air Force Base, Kentucky, USA. Captain James Duesler, a crash investigator at Godman, revealed (after his retirement) that he had inspected the Mustang’s wreckage. The pilot’s body had been removed - all the bones, according to fellow-officers, pulverised. But oddest of all was the manner in which the plane had come down. ‘Its condition seemed too good to be consistent with a high-speed crash to the ground,’ Duesler said. ‘It was lying in a clearing in the woods. Because of the weight of the engine the F-51 should have descended nose-first and hit the ground at an angle… [but] there were no scratches on the fuselage and no signs of blood in the cockpit. Even if the aircraft had managed to glide in it would have cut a swathe through the trees and a channel into the earth. But there was nothing. It was as if the plane had just belly-flopped into the clearing.’
Also evocative of long-ago events were the Queensland witnesses’ statements that they saw a ‘huge white flare’ in the moonless sky about the time of the Super King crash. During the 1930s newspapers reported similar ‘flares’ over Australia’s Bass Strait, after two planes, with their pilots and passengers, vanished (as it would transpire) forever. On 22 October 1934, in a report on the disappearance of mailplane Miss Hobart, the Melbourne Age said, ‘The possibility of the missing plane being in the sea in the vicinity of Cape Liptrap is strengthened by information gained from…the crew of the collier Kooliga. At 7.30 pm on Friday, a whiteflare, which burned for about four seconds, was noted towards the land. Mr J. Millington, at the helm of the vessel, stated that the flare could not have been lights carried by search parties ashore, as it was too large and did not move…No flares were carried in the missing aeroplane.’
Another parallel with Queensland’s Super King crash - and the massive forces involved - can be found in yellowing copies of the Melbourne Herald of 3 October 1935. In its report on a second mailplane, Loina, which had crashed in Bass Strait - and whose three passengers and two crew were nowhere to be found - the newspaper describes how searchers found wreckage which astonished them. From Settlement Point they retrieved a petrol tank so telescoped that it suggested the plane had descended at colossal speed. Despite widespread searches no trace of the rest of the aircraft or of its human cargo was ever discovered.
Were the people aboard those long-ago aircraft destroyed by forces undreamed of in their day? And did the victims of the Charleville crash die in a mirror-image manner half a century later? There is, of course, no definitive answer. Only circumstantial evidence.
The Chicago Airport Cover-Up
At 4.30 pm on 7 November 2006 a circular, seemingly metallic, disc appeared in the sky above O’Hare Airport in Chicago, Illinois. The UFO’s arrival propelled US government bureaucrats into an extraordinary dither of denial and obfuscation.
So misleading were the Federal Aviation Authority’s official statements about the ‘non-existent’ object that the local newspaper, the conservative Chicago Tribune, was finally obliged to use legal means to discover the truth for its readers.
First to notice the aerial intruder was a United Airlines employee who was working on the ramp, helping prepare Flight 446 for departure to Charlotte, North Carolina. The man reported the object to his supervisors, saying it seemed to be hovering, just under the 1900-foot cloud deck, above Gate C17. As documentation would subsequently confirm, the employee reported that the ‘craft’ was perfectly round, looked metallic and was spinning.
Having completed the call to his supervisor the employee then alerted the 446 Flight Crew. Both the pilot and the first officer proceeded to watch the silent spinning disc from the cockpit of their Boeing 777, which was still sitting on the tarmac.
Now the word was spreading around the airport - and before long, other pilots, along with ground staff and passengers, were staring up at the modestly sized battle-grey visitor. Most observers agreed that it was difficult, after an initial glance, to look away.
One witness whom investigators regard as particularly important was a mechanic who was taxiing a Boeing 777 from the International Terminal to the company hangar on the airport’s northern side. ‘First I knew was when I heard pilots talking about the thing on the radio,’ he said. At first I thought they were kidding - but then I looked up and saw it. It was a dark-grey hazy disc hovering over C terminal and staying very steady - spinning and just standing in the air. I got the impression it was trying to stay as close as possible to the grey cloud cover.
After I’d parked the plane the object was no longer in t
he air - but I did notice an almost perfect circle in the cloud… I assumed it had powered its way up, creating that space. The hole closed up a few minutes later.’
The Chicago Tribune’s story became the most-read article ever to appear on its website - garnering more than one million page views from people around the world. But it had not been produced without difficulty. When transport reporter Jon Hilkevitch first approached the Federal Aviation Authority for comment, officials assured him that the spinning disc had been a mere freak of the weather - and that there were no witnesses whatever.
Hilkevitch called their bluff by successfully filing a Freedom of Information request and walking away with all the internal documents he needed. The memos and reports - some to government - led him to a wide additional range of highly credible witnesses, ranging from pilots and maintenance crews to managers at United Airlines. ‘These are people who’ve worked in aviation all their lives, describing simply and with expertise what they saw,’ he said.
In a subsequent article (7 January 2007) Hilkevitch wrote, ‘The fact that officials at United Airlines and the Federal Aviation Authority initially denied any knowledge of the incident made the story even more appealing. News organisations from a low-watt radio station in Delaware to a TV station in Australia phoned me to request interviews. Even Jay Leno cracked jokes on the Tonight show about inebriated workers at O’Hare.
‘Ufologists contacted me in droves with thanks for treating the subject in a serious manner - and thanked the Tribune, as a leading member of the mainstream media, for publishing the story. The reaction clearly [illustrates our] fascination with the possibility that we’re not alone in the universe…and that there are mysteries of our existence still to be unravelled.’
Jon Hilkevitch had never previously shown any particular interest in UFOs. His sole reason for covering the biggest story of his career was that he happened to be the paper’s transport reporter - and O’Hare airport was a part of his beat.
Puzzling Paintings from the Past
UFOs are often characterised as phenomena - or wild imaginings - peculiar to the 20th and 21st centuries. But people who have visited a range of European museums and art galleries know better. Flying discs, some with domes and portholes reminiscent of modern UFO photographs, are clearly depicted in religious paintings dated as early as the 13th century. A dramatic example is the grand work entitled The Madonna with Saint Giovannino. Painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494), the picture hangs as part of the Loeser collection in the Palazzo Vecchio. Over Mary’s shoulder a disc-shaped object can be seen hovering in the sky. Surmounting it, as the blow-up demonstrates, is a superstructure of some kind. On the base is a spherical protrusion (possibly twinning a second, concealed by shadow).
Light streams from the body of the UFO - and the artist draws attention to it by portraying a man and his dog staring upward.
These manned objects can be found in the fresco, The Crucifixion. Painted circa 1350 the images can be seen above the altar at the Visoki Decani Monastery in Kosovo Yugoslavia.
The Annunciation, painted in 1486 by Carlo Crivelli, hangs in the National Gallery, London. A disc-shaped machine with a prominent rim projects a beam of light through a window.
In 1566 a mass of circular objects was seen over Basel, Switzerland. This image by a contemporary artist is held at Zurich Central Library. In his Autobiography, published 1837, the Florentine sculptor Benvenuto Cellini recalled witnessing a similarly immense aerial presence. He recalls leaving Florence with a friend, to ride on horseback to Rome: ‘We had reached the top of a hill. Glancing behind us we saw something that prompted both of us at once to shout, ‘My God! What is that enormous thing above Florence?’ It was floating like a gigantic beam of flame, sparkling and shining.’
This rocket-like vehicle, witnessed over Arabia in 1479, was pictured in the contemporary Chronicle of Prodigies by historian Conrad Lycosthenes.
* Oddly, first-time witnesses are often oblivious to any relationship between the UFO event they have just experienced - and the pain and illness that sometimes follow. In 1980 the American-born investigator Paul Norman played me an audiotape that dramatised this classic psychological disjunction. Paul had interviewed an eminent professional man who owned a large country property. One night his wife had called him urgently out onto the verandah. When he joined her he saw in the darkness an enormous windowed ship descending into a nearby field. The couple stood watching the craft for a long time before it vanished almost instantaneously at enormous speed. On the cassette tape it was clear that Paul’s patience had outlasted that of the witness, who snapped testily that there was really nothing more to be said. Paul then asked the key question, ‘You didn’t have any headaches, then?’ After a long silence the victim replied, ‘Yes, I did have headaches. Has that got something to do with it?’ His advanced intellectual capacities notwithstanding, the witness had failed to connect sighting with symptoms.
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The Mary Celeste Syndrome
Ships Stripped of all Human Life
* * *
On 4 December 1872 the American brigantine Mary Celeste was discovered adrift in the Atlantic. The vessel was completely seaworthy; her cargo, provisions and water supply intact. On a table in the captain’s cabin a meal lay uneaten. In the forecastle the crew’s oilskins, boots and tobacco pipes were neatly arranged. But the crew themselves, their captain and his wife and daughter, had vanished - never to be seen again. Historians habitually describe this bizarre episode as the greatest of maritime mysteries. But the facts suggest otherwise. Crews and passengers had puzzlingly disappeared from intact vessels before. And the extraordinary Mary Celeste phenomenon would repeat itself throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, when a ‘ghost ship’ was found floating and inexplicably abandoned off the Australian coast…
Dockside, New York,
7 November 1872. Morning
FOR THE DARK-HAIRED 17-year-old beauty Katherine Richardson, this was the saddest of days. Less than a month had passed since she married her beloved childhood sweetheart Albert - and here she was today, on a bleak wharf far from their native Maine, waving farewell to him; saying goodbye when their lives together had scarcely begun.
As the daughter of a seafaring family Katherine had always known that long separations and gnawing anxiety were the trials a sailor’s wife must endure. But it was plain to her now that she had understood this only in theory. As she would later confess to her diary, the raw reality of parting was far more painful than she had ever imagined.
A cheer went up from the small knot of well-wishers around her. The 103-foot (31-metre) brig, sails spread, had begun to move away. Katherine’s tears almost blinded her to the sight of her lanky, boyish-looking husband, Albert Richardson, first mate, craning over the rail, arms outstretched, as if intent on somehow diminishing the fast-growing gap between them.
Sarah Briggs, 30, wife of the captain, leaned by the rail with her 2-year-old daughter Sophia, waving, alongside Albert, to the forlorn girl on the dock. In her nine years of marriage Sarah had endured many such wrenching farewells.
On the bridge stood stern-faced, spade-bearded Benjamin Spooner Briggs, 37, captain and part-owner of Mary Celeste. To those who would later recall in detail the events of that morning, he appeared quite untouched by the emotion on the dock. This was an important occasion in his life and he was according it the grave attention it deserved. Having extended himself financially to buy his interest in the brigantine he was determined to make this crucial voyage a success.
Photograph of the Mary Celeste in port.
Mary Celeste steered a path through the clamour of the harbour, past cutters, customs boats and noisy tugs and headed toward the open sea. To Katherine and her companions, the ship was a blur, now, their loved ones on the deck invisible. None of those left behind in New York guessed that they had seen the people aboard for the last time.
Less than an hour after weighing anchor, the 290-tonne brigantine
was under full sail, en route to Genoa, Italy. Her principal cargo was grain alcohol in 1,700 red oak barrels: an investment from which Benjamin Briggs and his partners were confident of making a large profit. For weeks, the buoyant Briggs had been telling associates that this would be Mary Celeste’s ‘maiden voyage’. But the assertion applied, in reality, only to the name freshly painted on her prow.
* * *
The vessel had been launched 12 years earlier from the Joshua Dewis shipyard on Spencer Island, Nova Scotia. Sailing under the name Amazon she had survived a long string of misfortunes, including a fire, two collisions and a near-fatal wreck. In 1870 Captain Briggs’s principal partner, the shipowner James Winchester, had bought the brigantine for the bargain price of £3,000. He refitted the ship and sheathed her bottom in copper. By September 1872 the sparkling, newly christened Mary Celeste had been reregistered as an American vessel and was sitting at Pier 44 in New York’s East River, ready to go to work.
Captain Briggs chose seven known and trusted men to sail with him. Aside from first mate Richardson the crew comprised second mate Andrew Gillings, cook Edward Head and four seamen, Gottlieb Goodschaad, Ari Martens and brothers Boz and Volkert Lorenzen. Mrs Sarah Briggs and 2-year-old Sophia were making the journey at the captain’s request. Sophia’s brother, 7-year-old Thomas, had hoped to come, too, but his father insisted that he stay home to continue his schoolwork.
Sarah Briggs had sailed with her husband before - and knew how tedious the long hours at sea could be. To relieve the monotony she had brought along a sewing machine, on which she would make clothes for her children, a box filled with toys for Sophia and a handsome musical instrument, the New Melodeon, which Benjamin had bought her for a past birthday and at whose keyboard she was now adept.