There was no sound to begin with, just an eerie shape, looming in from the distance. Some say it looked like a giant silver cigar, others a flying saucer, a metallic disc, shimmering overhead.
As the craft slowed to a hover above Westall High School, the children in the playground started screaming. One of the eyewitnesses, Mary Eastwood, said it felt like ‘the end of the world’. Students were running around, hysterical, or throwing themselves to the ground in panic. Mary and her friend sat on the perimeter fence, dumbstruck.
The only thing we know for sure almost 60 years later is that something strange and unnerving happened at the school, just south-east of Melbourne, on an April morning in 1966. Official efforts to dismiss the eye-witness reports by insisting the ‘craft’ was nothing more than a stray weather balloon have never quite succeeded and a secret government report into the incident has never been released.
Indeed, that explosive report – authored by a high-ranking aviation official – is believed to rubbish the official explanation that the mysterious object was a high-altitude balloon.
So, it is no surprise that many of the people at Westall that day – students, teachers and residents of nearby Clayton South – resolutely believe what they saw was an alien spacecraft, a UFO. And now, even more astonishingly, a leading UFO investigator says what they actually encountered might have been a captured alien craft deployed as part of secret U.S. military tests.
Author Ross Coulthart has spent decades investigating the Westall incident and is convinced the truth has been deliberately covered up.
The key to the mystery lies in the secret official report into Australia’s most significant mass sighting of an unidentified craft which is still buried away in the bowels of the Department of Defence archives.
According to sources familiar with the document, it was compiled in 1967 by an engineer – known only as ‘Mr X’ – who was working as the Assistant Controller of the Aircraft, Guided Weapons and Electronics Supply Division of the government’s now-defunct Department of Supply.
Leading UFO investigator Ross Coulthart claims the truth about the Westall incident has been deliberately covered up, with a secret official report into Australia’s most significant mass sighting still buried away in the bowels of the Department of Defence archives
A purported photograph of the Westall UFO incident, in which almost 200 students, teachers and residents in south-east Melbourne claimed to have witnessed an unexplained flying object hovering near a suburban school before descending onto a nearby open field in 1966
A newspaper clipping outlining what several witnesses saw on that fateful day in 1966
Coulthart claims only two copies of the ‘Westall Papers’ were ever made. One was destroyed by Mr X’s widow on his orders after his death, while the other remains hidden from public sight.
‘One of the things that happened in the wake of the Westall incident was that an official, who was very senior in Australian aviation, was retained by Defence to write an investigation into what took place that day,’ Coulthart tells Daily Mail Australia.
‘He’s since died… but I have spoken with the son of the man who wrote the report.
‘He says his father worked on the report in the family home and that he became aware as a child of the fact that his dad was travelling to the Westall school for three or four days in a row in what became an extraordinarily intense investigation.
‘And his father was so freaked out by what he discovered – the implications of what he learned – that he gave a secret copy of the Westall Papers to his wife and told her to keep it hidden away in a particular location in the family home.
‘He made her promise she would destroy it when he died but, essentially, that was his insurance policy.
‘Mr X’s son doesn’t know what was precisely revealed in that document, but he does have a strong recollection of his father’s position on the Westall incident, and believes the truth went well beyond the simple spy balloon explanation.
‘He watched his mother burn the report in their back garden after his father died but there is another copy that was the filed with the Department of Supply.’
Coulthart, a five-times Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist, says the mystery file was transferred to the Defence archives after the Department of Supply was dissolved in June 1974.
INTELLIGENTLY CONTROLLED CRAFT
Andrew Greenwood was a teacher at Westall High School when the unexplained incident occurred – and says he was later threatened into silence.
He vividly recalls a ‘hysterical’ student running into his Year 9 science class during first break, claiming there was a flying saucer in the sky. While dubious at first, Mr Greenwood nonetheless went outside and was shocked to see a bright silver object ‘the size of a car’ hovering in the air near the school.
He said the object began to slowly rise into the sky before it was approached by five aircraft. Whenever these aircraft drew close to the silver object, it quickly darted in a different direction before stopping again.
The cat-and-mouse encounter continued for about 20 minutes before the object landed briefly in a nearby field – known as the Grange Reserve – then shot away and vanished into the sky entirely.
Andrew Greenwood, one of the teachers at Westall High School during the UFO encounter, has described a frightening visit he received from government officials demanding he keep quiet
Terry Peck, who was a student at Westall, shows former 60 Minutes investigative reporter Ross Coulthart a series of drawings of what she saw hovering above her school in April 1966
Within 40 minutes, air force and army personnel poured into the area in military vehicles and formed a secure barrier around the reserve. But, knowing the area well, Mr Greenwood and dozens of students were able to sneak in and see what was going on.
‘[We saw a] circular area, like trampled grass,’ Mr Greenwood says. ‘And there were guards around it and there were people in there with equipment.’
Mr Greenwood remains convinced the object he witnessed was an alien aircraft.
‘I saw a craft. A mechanical object intelligently controlled hovering above me,’ he told Coulthart in The Phenomenon, a documentary released in 2022.
He added that after discussing the incident with local news reporters, Mr Greenwood received an unexpected – and unwelcome – late-night visit at his home from two men claiming to be government officials.
According to him, one was wearing plain clothes and the other a high-ranking air force uniform. They told him his recollection of the incident was incorrect – and he would be well advised to stop talking about the encounter.
‘When I tried to explain to them that they weren’t there – I was – and I knew what I saw, well, the first suggestion was, ‘You’d be ill-advised to go on saying that because clearly you were drunk on duty and will have to be reported to the education department and of course you will lose your job’,’ he says.
‘Absolutely, I was threatened. I was told that I should not say anything.’
He believes the intimidating visit was part of a government conspiracy to cover up the country’s largest mass UFO encounter.
EYEWITNESSES THREATENED
One oft-reported explanation for the Westall incident is that the object could have been a runaway high-altitude atmospheric balloon from the HIBAL program at Mildura Airport, about a six-hour drive away in Victoria’s north-west.
The program was established by Australia’s Department of Supply in conjunction with the US Atomic Energy Commission in 1960. It purportedly used white and silver high-altitude balloons to sample the levels of radioactive elements injected into the stratosphere by atomic experiments in the Pacific Ocean.
Some sceptics have suggested the object spotted hovering over the Westall school in 1966 was a runaway high-altitude atmospheric balloon from Mildura Airport about six hours away
But Coulthart – who has led investigations across ABC’s Four Corners, Nine’s 60 Minutes and Seven’s Sunday Night flagship news and current affairs programs – is convinced there is a more sinister explanation.
‘Andrew’s account is extraordinarily credible,’ Coulthart tells Daily Mail Australia.
‘And he’s adamant that what he saw was something anomalous that he couldn’t explain away as a balloon or anything like that.
‘In fact, he says categorically that it was not a balloon of any kind whatsoever, that it was clearly some kind of craft.
‘He says he saw an elliptical, metallic disc-shaped object moving in some intelligent way.
‘And he’s not the only one. There are well over 180 witnesses who saw the exact same thing – people like Terry Peck, who has a particularly vivid memory of what she saw, and who is equally adamant ‘it was not a balloon’.
Peck, a former student at Westall, provided Coulthart with a series of drawings of what she saw hovering above her school.
Recounting that fateful April day, she claimed she jumped over the school fence and raced towards where the UFO had landed in the pines.
By the time she arrived, two other classmates were already there. One of them, a girl, was hysterical. Peck alleges the student was carried off in an ambulance and never came back to school.
What happened next still troubles her.
‘We all got called to an assembly… and they told us all to keep quiet,’ she says.
‘I know this sounds corny, but I know what I saw. It was not a balloon. It was a machine, a craft.’
‘I’d absolutely just like someone to come forward from the services just to say, “Yes, it did happen, and it landed and there was a cover-up”.’
Coulthart says he has since spoken to multiple people who attended the assembly who all shared the same story.
‘They all describe how there were officials from the government and people in uniform who were standing up the back of the hall who were listening to what was being said to the students,’ he says.
And it wasn’t only the students being warned.
‘We’ve spoken to firemen who attended the incident, and numerous people who were told – threatened – that if they talked about this, this was a national security issue, and that they should shut up about it,’ Coulthart says.
Five-time Walkley Award-winning journalist Ross Coulthart vows he will continue investigating the ‘non-human technology’ involved in encounters such as the Westall mass sighting despite ongoing attempts to discredit anyone who speaks out about the ‘biggest story in history’
‘Moreover, when the recovery operation happened, there were American-accented personnel driving American left-hand-drive jeeps.
‘So, it’s just absurd to try to patronise these witnesses by saying, ‘You don’t know what you saw, it was just a spy or weather balloon’. That’s bollocks, absolute rubbish.’
PUBLIC LEFT IN DARK
Coulthart has spent years pushing for the Westall Papers to be made public, but fears they may remain locked away in the Defence Department forever. In the absence of the full report, he has been able to assemble only tantalising pieces of the jigsaw.
‘Certainly, there was detailed analysis that was done: soils removed, there were radiation detectors used, Geiger counters used,’ Coulthart says.
‘It was the most extraordinarily intense investigation and the public has been completely left in the dark.
‘I suspect there was a finding [in the Westall Papers] that the object was American technology. I am convinced the Americans have been using Australia as a secret location for testing of technology – non-human technology – that became too sensitive to test in places like Area 51, the Nevada Test Range.
‘There’s been an ongoing Cold War between the Russians, the Chinese and the Americans over who gets access to this retrieved, non-human technology – and fighting for the knowledge of how to use it and how to develop and replicate it.
‘We’ve moved beyond the argument about whether these things are real. It’s been formally admitted that they’re real.
‘What we have now is a continuing attempt at a feeble cover-up by the Pentagon and the intelligence community, which, I suspect, believes that it can derive some kind of hegemonical American military advantage from the technology that it is hiding.
‘That is why the public is being lied to about incidents like Westall, and why this is being concealed.’
THE ROAD AHEAD
The Westall sighting has become one of the most enduring of Australian mysteries.
The incident has not only featured in a raft of popular documentaries, but has also been commemorated at the site itself with a UFO-themed playground.
HIBAL balloons were used to sample the levels of radioactive elements in the atmosphere
Officially, the Department of Defence insists it is ‘not aware’ of the existence of the Westall Papers and critics continue to dismiss Coulthart’s work. However, the investigator says that despite the passage of time, he will continue to push for the release of Mr X’s secret report.
‘I have been vilified and attacked for investigating the technology involved in these kinds of encounters,’ he tells me.
‘Numerous people I have spoken to have told me it is routine for people who are working inside this secret program to be intimidated and threatened with death if they reveal what they know.
‘But there is no amount of intimidation or bullying or threats that will stop me from investigating this. It’s too far down the track.
‘This is the biggest story in human history, and I know it’s real.’
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