What happened
On the evening of 21 October 1978, 20-year-old Frederick Valentich took off from Moorabbin in a Cessna 182 bound for King Island across Bass Strait. Just after 7 p.m. he radioed Melbourne Flight Service to ask about traffic at his altitude. There was none on record. Over the next six minutes he described a large aircraft with four bright lights passing about a thousand feet above him at high speed, coming back toward him, seeming to play with him, then hovering or orbiting overhead. He said it had a shiny metallic surface and a green light. His engine began running rough. Asked to identify the craft, he answered that it was not an aircraft. The transmission ended in a stretch of metallic, scraping noise, and then nothing. A sea and air search covering more than a thousand square miles found no trace of the plane or pilot. The Department of Transport's file, now in the National Archives of Australia, records the cause as unknown.
The official explanation
Transport officials speculated that the inexperienced Valentich became disoriented, possibly flying inverted and seeing his own lights reflected in the water or lights on the coast. James McGaha and Joe Nickell argued in 2013 that a tilted-horizon illusion led him into a descending 'graveyard spiral', with the rough engine caused by G-forces on fuel flow and the overhead lights being Venus, Mars, Mercury and Antares. Others have suggested he staged his disappearance, noting his unexplained reasons for the trip, or that he was re-enacting a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A Cessna 182 cowl flap from the right serial range washed up on Flinders Island in 1983.
The anomalous case
The heart of the case is a calm, recorded radio exchange in which a licensed pilot describes, in real time, an unknown craft manoeuvring around his aircraft before the line goes dead; Valentich's last description, 'It's not an aircraft', is preserved in the official transcript. No wreckage was found in the search, and no body was ever recovered. Investigators of the 1978 wave catalogued many reports of lights over Victoria and Bass Strait around that date; Richard Haines and Paul Norman reported that Norman located 20 witnesses along the Great Ocean Road who described an erratically moving green light at the time of the flight. Researcher Keith Basterfield said interviews with doctors and colleagues all but ruled out suicide, and the official cause remains undetermined almost half a century later.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- NAA: B1497, V116/783/1047 - DSJ, Cape Otway to King Island 21 Oct 1978, Aircraft missing (Valentich) official, recordsearch.naa.gov.au
Sources
- Disappearance of Frederick Valentich Wikipedia
- UAP reports from Victoria, Bass Strait and Tasmania, 18-23 October 1978 (Keith Basterfield) Project 1947
Witness reports elsewhere
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