When most of us think of Unidentified Flying Objects our thoughts turn to far away places: the WWII Battle of Los Angeles or the infamous weather balloon that landed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. What many Victorians don’t know is that we are home to one of the world’s most famous UFO events. One with as many as 100 witnesses, many of whom are still telling their stories.

According to newspapers and reports of the time, on 6 April 1966 something strange happened at a patch of scrubby, pine-ringed bushland called The Grange in Melbourne’s sleepy south-eastern suburbs. The Grange is across the way from Westall Secondary School (then Westall High) and backs onto farmland. In the 1960s it was visited by farmers looking for a place to graze their cattle and by kids and teens looking for a place to explore.  On 6 April it was reportedly the destination of some strange and unusual visitors: Unidentified Flying Objects¹. The Dandenong Journal of 14 April leads with the evocative headline FLYING SAUCER MYSTERY: SCHOOL SILENT. As reports of the 6 April incident flooded in, with no official word from the school, the team at The Dandenong Journal attempted to piece the story together.

Reports from eyewitnesses claim that just before morning recess a series of ‘dazzling silvery object(s)’² appeared over high school oval, moving toward The Grange. One of the objects was larger than the others with witnesses describing it as ’round with a hump on top and round things underneath’³ or as an object that was ‘silver grey and seemed to “thicken” sometimes. The thickening was similar to when a disc is turned a little to show the underside.’ ⁴

Witnesses also described ‘many private aircraft, mainly Cessna’⁵ flying toward and around the UFOs. A two-page, anonymous report from The Clayton Calendar (the Westall High journal, unfortunately not held by State Library Victoria), goes into some detail about the craft and speculates that they may have been military aircraft, coming from nearby Moorabbin airport. This account was republished in its entirety in the June 1966 issue of the Australian Flying Saucer Review. The Victorian Flying Saucer Research Society (later the Victorian UFO Research Society) inspected the scene and interviewed a number of witnesses but at the time no exhaustive account was published. The VFSRS had members across the state and was based quite close to Westall, in the southeastern suburb of Moorabbin (the site of another famous event purportedly tied to the paranormal, the disappearance of Frederick Valentich in 1987).

While the event was heavily reported in the local news outlets, it also hit the Melbourne papers. The small write-up in The Age ‘Object perhaps balloon’ posits that the witnesses may in fact have seen merely a weather balloon, noting the the ‘Weather Bureau released a balloon at Laverton at 8:30 am and the westerly wind…could have moved it into the area where the sighting was reported’.⁶

We may never know with certainty what happened in Westall that April morning in 1966, the stories remain and the conviction of the witnesses has not wavered. What we can be sure of is that there are often mysteries where we least expect them, perhaps there’s one in your own backyard.

As for The Grange, it now hosts a UFO themed children’s playground and a walking track. No accounts of a return of these craft have been reported.

References

1. Current preference is for the term Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or UAPs. This post will use the language of the time
2. Untitled article from the Clayton Calendar, reprinted in Australian flying saucer review, June 1966, p 13
3. Marilyn Eastwood, 2010, Something is out there, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, p 179
4. Andrew Greenwood, teacher at Westall High School, interviewed by the Dandenong Journal, 21 April 1966, p 1
5. The Clayton Calendar, reprinted in Australian Flying Saucer Review, June 1966, p 13
6. ‘Object perhaps balloon’, The Age, 7 April 1966, p 6