What happened
On a clear, hot morning, banana grower George Pedley was driving a tractor past Horseshoe Lagoon on Albert Pennisi's cane farm near Tully, in far north Queensland, when he heard a loud hiss like air escaping from a tyre. Checking his wheels, he looked up and saw, about 25 yards ahead, a dull grey object some 25 feet across, shaped like two saucers rim to rim, rising from the swamp at treetop height. It spun, climbed vertically, then shot away to the southwest at an angle far faster than any aircraft and vanished. Where it had risen he found a near-circular patch of reeds about 32 by 25 feet, flattened clockwise down to the water and torn out by the roots. Police sergeant A.V. Moylan visited the site next morning and sent a report and grass samples to the RAAF. Hundreds of sightseers came, more 'nests' were found nearby, and the term 'saucer nest' entered the language two decades before crop circles.
The official explanation
Sergeant Moylan thought a small helicopter might have made the depression, though no aircraft were in the area and there was clear land nearby for a safer landing. RAAF Operational Command believed small waterspouts flattened the reeds, and in February 1966 the Secretary of the Department of Air wrote that University of Queensland testing found nothing unnatural in the samples and that line-squall turbulence could explain the nests. In 1973 the Defence public relations office called a 'willy-willy' whirlwind, which can hiss and lift debris, the most probable explanation, citing the clockwise swirl.
The anomalous case
Pedley reported a solid, spinning object, not a column of spray, in clear sunshine with no storm, close enough to judge its size against the trees. His police statement, recorded within a day, describes a hiss heard over the tractor's engine, vertical lift-off and a fast climbing departure that ended in mid-air, while RAAF Townsville confirmed no service or civil aircraft were operating nearby. The reeds were not just bent but uprooted from the mud. Researcher Bill Chalker, who found the original police report in RAAF files, notes the 1966 Department of Air letter conceded there was no explanation for the visible phenomenon, offering whirlwinds only for the nests. Shane Pennisi, whose family has left the lagoon untouched, told the Australian Women's Weekly he has no doubt Pedley saw something real.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- A Catalogue of Australian Physical Trace Cases (Tully 1966, with RAAF file extracts) Bill Chalker, Project 1947
- Crop circles in Australia: The unsolved mystery of Tully The Australian Women's Weekly
- UFO sightings in Australia Wikipedia
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.