LinkExchange Member

Free Home Pages at GeoCities

Did UFO Abduct Aircraft?

At 7:06 P.M. Saturday, October 21, 1978, as Frederick Valentich, 20, was flying south from Melbourne, Australia to King Island near Tasmania, he radioed ground control with what seemed like a routine query. He asked if there were any known aircraft in his area below 5000 feet. The Melbourne Flight Service Unit (FSU) told him there was none.

Valentich didn't agree. "Seems to be a large aircraft below 5000 feet," he responded/

"What type of aircraft?" Flight Controller Steve Robey asked.

"I can't confirm. It has four bright lights . . . appear to be landing lights. Aircraft has just passed over mne at about 1000 feet above."

" Is large aircraft confirmed?"

"Affirmative," the pilot said. "At the speed it is traveling, are there any RAAF aircraft in the vininity?"

"Negative," FSU assured him.

After a brief pause Valentich radioed back at 7:08 P.M. "Melbourne, it's approaching from due east towards me," he reported. "It seems to be playing some sort of game, Flying at a speed I cannot estimate."

"What is your altitude?"

"4500 feet."

"Can you confirm you can't identify aircraft?"

"Affirmative."

One minute later Valentich said, "It's not an aircraft. It's--" His voice faded our. Flight Controller Robey waited for a time, then asked, "Can you describe aircraft?"

Valentich's transmission returned. "It is flying past," he said. "It is a long shape. Cannot identify more than that. Coming for me right now. It seems to be stationary. I'm orbiting and the thing is orbiting on top of me also. It has a green light and sort of metallic light on the outside."

Valentich then said the object seemed to have vanished.

FSU: "Confirm it has vanished."

Valentich: "Affirmative. Do you know what sort of aircraft I've got? Is it military?"

FSU:"No military aircraft in the area."

At 7:12 Valentich reported, "Engine in rough-idling and coughing."

FSU acknowledged that message and then heard a "long metalic noise" over the radio. And then all contact with the aircraft and its pilot was lost.

Within hours the story had become an international sensation. The next morning newspapers all across Australasia were giving it headline treatment and by evening the entire world had been alerted to the most spectacular UFO related incident in years.

When Valentich, who had been flying his Cessna 182 to King Island both to pick up crayfish and to build up his night flying hours, failed to turn up at the island at his scheduled arrival time of 7:28, light aircraft began a visual and a radio search which was to last five days, until the following Thursday. All Sunday an RAFF Orion, a long range maritime reconnaissance aircraft popular with the RAFF and the Royal New Zealand Air Force, searched the area off Cape Otway at the north end of Tasmania, where the aircraft was last heard from. It discovered an oil slick 16 miles north of Cape Wickham and the crew planted a marker buoy at the spot. The Orion also reported "wreckage" about 25 miles from Cape Wickham, on King Island. A boat sent from the island retrieved the "wreckage" which turned out to be nothing more than submerged cardboard fruit cartons and plastic bags. Another boat collected samples of the oil slick. These were sent to Melbourne for tests, which revealed the material to be diesel fuel from a ship.

In the meantime reports of UFO sightings in the general area of the plane's disapperance increased dramatically. Although many of the reports probably were of misidentified conventional objects, others seem more difficult to explain. Only an hour after Valentich's exchange with the Melbourne Flight Service Unit, a couple on the south coast of New South Wales, Wayne and Rosaline Bellow, watched a bright white UFO perform "impossible aerobatics" over the ocean. An hour after that, at Queenscliff on Victoria's southern tip, Barbara Bishop reported what appeared to be a Ferris wheel spinning across the sky.

In the following days other reports came from Geelong, Frankston, Brighton and Cape Otway. Some described the object as "brilliantly lit, oblong in shape and moving very quickly." Others said they saw unusual flashes of light which remained in the sky for several seconds.

But official sources were not long in supplying an "explanation" for the plane's ddisappearance. The Australian Department of Transportation suggested Valentich had become disoriented and was flying upside down during the conversation with ground control. " It is possible the pilot was seeing light reflected off cloud from the Cape Otway lighthouse and one at King Island as he flew upside down in the early evening light," a spokesman said.

In view of the facts that flying connditions were ideal, with fine weather and almost unlimited visibility, and that the aircraft carried a "black box" radio survival beacon transmitting on a high distress frequency, this explanation seems farfetched.

Aviation authorities dismissed the department's theory as absurd. They pointed out that the Cessna 182 would have been able to fly "inverted" for no more than 50 seconds because its fuel tanks were in the wings and relied on gravity to feed the motor. Also, a veteran flyer Authur Schutt, head of an Australian aviation company, observed, "In that half-light the pilot would have soon known if the aircraft had started to turn upside down. The carpet comes out of the floor and the butts fall out of the ashtray." Flight Controller Robey also had his doubts about the theory:"I don't believe he [Valentich] was disoriented because he was communicating quiet clearly."

But the upside-down theory was reasonable compared to others put forward by would-be-debunkers. The Department of Transport, expressing confidence that "there is usually some practical explanation," trotted out the old Project Blue Book claims that "UFO's" inevitably turn out to be satellites, Venus, reflections off clouds and other conventional phenomena."As for things seen from aircraft these can usually be put down to atmospheric conditions," a Transport spokesman said in response to criticisms of the upsids-down theory. He then went on to speculate imaginatively that the plane may have been hit by a meteorite! A Melbourne scienties ascended even farther into the wild blue yonder when he proposed that an "aura caused by sunspots at night"--whatever that means-- may have caused Valentich to believe a UFO was approaching him.

Guido Valentich, the father of the missing flyer, sai dhe hoped a UFO had been involved in his son's disappearance. "I would rather that than them finding the wreckage of the plane," he said. " The fact that they have found no trace of him really verifies the fact that UFOs could have been there. . . . I believe he was sucked up into the air by a UFO and then forced back to earth somewhere--central Australia perhaps."

Rhonda Rushton, the pilot's 16-year-old girl friend, believes Valentich landed in rugged bushland near Cape Otway and is still alive. Miss Rushton went to the Cape hoping to find him but returned red-eyed and empty-handed. She vehemently denied she had gone there for a motel rendezvous with her boyfriend.

"I only went there to see what the bush was like here he might have landed," she insisted. "I still think he's alive and we won't stop searching for him until we know for sure what has happened."

The elder Valentich also reacts angrily to suggestions that the disappearance is an elaborate, carefully planned hoax. "What about the family's fellings?" he says. "What about my son's career? It is outrageous to suggest he is hiding somewhere."

Speculation about a possible hoax was fueled by press reports that Guido Valentich was a long-time UFO buff and that his son also had an interest, although apparently a less intense one, in the subject. The father said frankly that his son "believes in UFOs and he told me he has seen classified material at the Sale RAAF base which confirmed his beliefs."

Skeptics found a statement of Rhonda Rushton's even more interesting: "He told me once," she said, "that if a UFO did come to earth he would go back with it but not without me." She added, "We talked about UFOs but he wasn't as keen on them as some people have said."

Australasian ufologists were not so quick to embrace the UFO explanation as many members of the general public seemed to be. Dr. Jan F. de Bock, director of UFO investigations for New Zealand's largest UFO group, the Earth Colonization Research Association, said he considered UFO involvement "unlikely" but said his group would reserve final judgment until "full investigations are made by governmental and UFO authorities."

But there is precedent in the literature of ufology for reported UFO abductions of aircraft. The best known and best-documented--occurred over Lake Superior on November 23, 1953, when an F-89 interceptor vanished while in pursuit of a UFO. Air Defense Command radar equipment at Kinross Air Force Base near Soo Locks, Mich., tracked the jet and the UFO until blips of the two craft merged. The blip of the UFO then streaked off the scope. No trace of the F-89 or its two occupants was ever found.

Less well known are two reports described to Tom Comella by Master Sergeant O. D. Hill of Project Blue Book. In an article published in the May 1961 issue of FATE ("Have UFOs 'Swallowed' Our Aircraft?") Comella claims that in October 1955 Hill, then stationed at Wright Patterson Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, told him and fellow ufologist Edgar Smith about two separate incidents, one involving an F-89 interceptor and the other a transport plane with 26 persons aboard, in which radar had witnessed UFOs abducting aircraft.

There have been persistent but so far unverified rumors of other such cases.

A month after Frederick Valentich's disappearance, three possible explanations for the incident remained:

(1) His plane crashed into Bass Strait for reasons having nothing to do with UFOs. This is the Department of Transport's official view but so far there is no evidence to support it.

(2) Valentich engineered an elaborate hoax. To date this supposition rests mainly on the suspicion, valid or invalid, that his interest in UFOs and his speculations about being taken up in one inspired him to stage a phony UFO abduction. Solid evidence that this is what in fact took place has yet to come to light.

(3) A UFO stole away with Valentich and his airplane. The direct evidene: Valentich's radio reports to the Melbourne Flight Service Unit. The circumstantial evidence: the other UFO reports in the area immediately after his disappearance. To this we might add whaat could be termed the "negative evidence" : namely, the absence of solid evidence for (1) and (2).

Perhaps the full truth will be known by the time you read this. Or perhaps it never will be known.