Tania Vassie was playing on the school oval when she looked up into the clear autumn sky to see a “strange, rounded, two-storey disc floating up above”.
The 13-year-old watched, transfixed, as the object moved through the sky erratically, dashing at speed from one direction to another.
Then she ran, yelling, into the school.
“I remember rushing down the corridor, screaming: ‘Flying saucer, flying saucer,'” Tania tells Australian Story.
“Children came from everywhere; teachers came from everywhere.”
So began one of Australia’s most intriguing mysteries — an event so unusual and surrounded by conspiracy theories that it’s only been in recent years Tania has felt comfortable talking about what she swears she saw 60 years ago.
Tania wasn’t the only one to see it. Scores of people watched from the school oval — some in amazement, some in terror — as an unidentified flying object swept across the skies above Westall High School and the adjacent primary school in Melbourne’s south-east on April 6, 1966. Some saw up to three objects.
It remains the biggest mass sighting of a UFO in Australian history.
A case of mass hysteria?
Many UFO enthusiasts are convinced it was an extra-terrestrial visitation. Others believe the answer to the mystery lies in a more Earth-bound explanation.
Ken Stallard, a former Westall student and retired school principal, believes the object was likely part of a secret military program but argues that, by definition, it was a UFO.
“I saw what I saw and so did all my school friends, hundreds of us,” he says. “It was unidentified, it was flying and it was clearly an object.”
Richard Saunders of Australian Skeptics Inc does not doubt something happened that day.
“It’s just trying to find the most reasonable explanation without jumping to fantasy … or the very unlikely event of an alien in a spacecraft,” Mr Saunders says.
“People would rather jump to a conclusion which is quite far-fetched, and be satisfied, than simply say: ‘We just don’t know.'”
Westall researcher Grant Lavac points out some sceptics suggest mass hysteria could be at play.
“I don’t think it’s something that can be completely discounted,” he says. “But in the absence of documentary evidence, I can only go off what the witnesses recall and testify to. And so, it’s clear they saw something.”
James Fox, a US filmmaker who directed the 2020 documentary The Phenomenon that focused on UFOs in the US but included Westall, says most sightings can be explained in “conventional, prosaic terms”.
But, he argues, about 10 or 15 per cent remain confounding. Westall is one of them.
“The significance of the Westall case is the fact that there were so many people, the sheer volume of firsthand eyewitnesses saying the same thing 60 years ago as they are today,” Mr Fox says.
Not only did so many see the objects but multiple witnesses report that within 30 minutes, men in uniform arrived at a spot close to the school where some say they saw the craft descend.
And then, the shutters came down. The school principal assembled the students and told them it was a weather balloon and not to talk about it. Some were ushered into a room where unidentified men told them to not to discuss what they’d seen.
Today, on the 60th anniversary, witnesses are demanding answers. Many are retired and no longer worried about being ridiculed or jeopardising their jobs by speaking out.
What were the objects? Were they top-secret military prototypes? And why aren’t there any government records documenting these events?
“What frustrates me and I think all the other pupils,” says Tania, who became a marketing and business manager, “is the attempt of having it buried.
“If it really was nothing of significance, well, let’s explain it. I think that’s all that everybody wants to know. Please, tell us what it was.”
‘Saucer-shaped’ object ‘the size of cars’: Vivid witness accounts
What a scene it must have been: scores of kids and teachers, standing in the school grounds, all peering skywards, pointing, slack-jawed, marvelling.
Even today, the witness accounts from former students are strikingly consistent. Ken Stallard remembers a flying object that was “large, easily visible, circular, silver”.
Former nurse Marilyn Smith says, “there were no windows … it was an oval shape about the size of two or three cars”. Joy Clarke says it moved at incredible speed and was “shiny, metallic [with a] dome in the middle”.
Self-confessed “naughty” student Terry Peck recalls how she and others vaulted the school fence to race after the “saucer-shaped” craft as it moved to a nearby area of bush known as the Grange.
“There was this strange thing just sitting there, hovering above the ground, quite big, about one-and-a-half times the size of a large sedan,” Terry says.
Then, she watched as the craft rose slowly into the air. “It turned on its side and it just went straight up into the air, so fast it was almost instantaneous.”
Left behind, says Terry and multiple other students, was a swirly pattern of yellowed grass — and a lifetime of questions.
For Mr Saunders, the consistency of witness accounts should be treated with caution.
“The big misconception is that we have good memories. We don’t,” he says. “When people are on the same page, more or less, there’s a group reinforcement of the common story … This is perfectly natural but it can be misleading.”
Curiosity led former teacher and public servant Shane Ryan to seek answers in 2005 — and he’s been researching ever since.
Mr Ryan learned that four days prior to the Westall sighting, engineer James Kibel was in the backyard of his home in the nearby suburb of Balwyn when he saw a flash of light in the sky.
Mr Kibel said he quickly snapped a Polaroid photo of a silver disc in the air. Mr Ryan acknowledges today that it could be a photo of something more mundane, like a bicycle bell or a hub cap.
“I know what James Kibel told me,” he says. “I’m just not in a position to know one way or another.”
Mr Ryan’s detailed research into the Westall sighting has led him to speak with 142 people from the school and surrounding properties who saw the object or objects in the sky and 197 people who saw the ground marks. Seventy-seven witnesses saw both.
“Every person has a slightly different perspective and a slightly different angle,” he says. “It’s amazing to me that there is so much commonality across the witness testimonies.”
Paul Smith was 16 at the time, and working close by at a market garden, when he stood up to ease his sore back. That’s when he saw something in the sky.
“I didn’t believe it because it couldn’t be happening,” he says.
“And I thought: ‘No, it’s not an aeroplane … It’s just sitting above the powerlines in the sky.'”
Many told Mr Ryan that over the years, they’d mentioned their close encounter to others and many times, they’d been ridiculed.
Witness Joy Clarke says people have criticised her. “I’ve had abuse over the years and people … calling me crazy. I have one question. Were you there? And they all say no. What have we got to lie about?”
Being able to tell their story to a non-judgemental listener was cathartic for them, Mr Ryan says, “like a relief valve being opened”.
One of the people he contacted was Claude Miller, one of the last surviving Westall teachers, who missed seeing the UFO because he was having a tea break before starting playground duty.
But he saw the aftermath: the frenzy of the kids and teachers, the chaos, the confusion.
Claude remembers bumping into his friend, science teacher Andrew Greenwood, as he walked back into the school, excited.
“The first words he said to me,” Claude recalls, “was something like: ‘Did you see it? Did you see it?'”
Andrew told Claude that he’d seen a flying craft that accelerated at “unimaginable speeds vertically, disappeared from one spot, turned up in another spot, changed direction, dropped and faded to nothing, then appeared somewhere else”.
Like others that day on the oval, Andrew also saw conventional light aircraft in the sky, seemingly interacting with the objects. The school was near Moorabbin airport.
Students were interviewed, then silenced
Later that day, a special assembly was called. School principal Frank Samblebe laid down the law. There were no such thing as flying saucers, he said. They were not to talk about what they saw to anyone. Get on with your studies and forget about it.
Some have interpreted this as an attempt to cover up the story. Others, like teacher Claude Miller, say the principal’s directive was understandable because: “No-one would have wanted their school to be the centre of a UFO sighting.”
Then, some students were taken, separately, to meet with men they’d never seen before. Tania was one of them.
She recalls the men suggesting she had seen a weather balloon.
When she disagreed, they changed their approach, suggesting she should stay quiet. She did so for 50 years.
“I kept my word to the point where I did not discuss it with my mother,” she says. “I did not discuss it with anybody.”
Other kids were bolder. Marilyn and Joy recall walking out of the school that day to see a Channel 9 news team waiting. The two girls and a few boys eagerly recounted the sighting, pointing to the sky in a re-enactment.
As the interviews were wrapping up, a policeman arrived to tell the journalists to leave. Both girls received detention.
Teacher Andrew Greenwood also spoke with the local Dandenong Journal newspaper. It would bring him into the sights of government officials who he claimed threatened him with losing his job if he spoke further.
In an interview recorded before Andrew died, he said: “I was told that I would be prosecuted … and that I had to keep quiet about it. Why did I have to keep quiet?”
ABC
