The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) is Australia’s national air force. Declassified files held in the National Archives of Australia show that anomalous sightings at North West Cape were reported to the RAAF for decades by soldiers, tourists, a senior American officer at the base, and a local fireman.1 In 1930, Squadron Leader George Jones was sent to investigate reports of a mystery aircraft flying inland over the coast near Warrnambool, Victoria, in what became the 1930 Warrnambool mystery aircraft investigation.2 Jones later became the RAAF’s Chief of Air Staff during the Second World War and was known as Air Marshal Sir George Jones.3
In May 1954, security officer Sydney Baker said that at the Woomera Rocket Range he witnessed an object travelling across the path of an approaching Canberra aircraft - the RAAF’s first jet-propelled bomber4 - at a speed he estimated to be three times the aircraft’s velocity of approximately 870 kilometres per hour.5 That same year, Harry Turner gained access to the RAAF’s UAP sightings reports6 to conduct the 1954 Harry Turner Directorate of Air Force Intelligence (DAFI) Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) review. According to In Plain Sight, his report concluded that the evidence presented by the RAAF tended to support the conclusion that certain strange aircraft had been observed behaving in a manner suggestive of extra-terrestrial origin.7 According to Hair of the Alien: DNA and Other Forensic Evidence for Alien Abductions, Harry Turner’s 1954 classified UFO scientific appreciation report reached the same conclusion.8 Turner was rebuffed over these extra-terrestrial findings,9 the RAAF chose to heed its American ally and play down his hypothesis,10 and his access to the sightings files was later withdrawn.11
According to In Plain Sight, film shown to a United States Air Force (USAF) sergeant in 1967 - the 1967 Central Australia Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) photo-mapping Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) film - had reportedly been shot from an RAAF aircraft during a photo-mapping flight over Central Australia in about 1965.12 In January 1966, a sighting near Tully, Queensland, involving farmer George Pedley drew close attention from the RAAF.13 According to In Plain Sight, the RAAF’s investigation attributed the so-called Tully Nests to whirling masses of tropical air known as ‘Willy Willies’.14 During Graham’s early 1970s Kiama solid light encounter, Graham (Kiama solid light witness) said he phoned the Nowra RAAF base, where a duty officer told him the light he had seen was an orange weather balloon released from Jamberoo that had not inflated properly.15
The RAAF’s files also document a cluster of reports at North West Cape in 1973. On 1973-10-25, Bill Lynn and US officer Lieutenant Commander Moyer or Meyer independently reported to the RAAF that they had seen a revolving or pulsating object hovering in the sky, according to In Plain Sight.16 In an ‘Unusual Aerial Sighting’ report to the RAAF, Moyer or Meyer said his attention had been drawn to a large black object in the clear sky.17 Lynn’s daughter, Kate Lynn, recalled her father describing how he used the bonnet of his pick-up truck to sketch the object and make notes about what he saw,18 and that sketch appears in his RAAF sighting report.19 According to In Plain Sight, the original reports were lawfully released to researchers by the RAAF’s public relations section in 1974-75, years before Australian freedom of information laws were enacted,20 though there are now no records of the 1973 sighting in declassified RAAF sighting records from that year held by the National Archives of Australia.21 Both the official records and direct witness testimony suggest the Australian and US military were surprisingly incurious about the incursion, given it was reported by both a senior American officer and an Australian witness over one of their most sensitive facilities.22 Two further official Australian Air Force sightings reports detail an incident at the United States Naval Communication Station near Exmouth, Western Australia, the same base where Annie Farinaccio had her encounter with a triangular object in the early 1990s.23
Bill Chalker, an Australian scientist and UAP researcher trained in mathematics and chemistry, was the first civilian researcher to gain access to the RAAF’s UAP files, in the early 1980s.24 Chalker has said that political myopia from both the US and Australian military effectively scuttled Australia’s first serious flirtation with scientific investigation of UFOs.25 According to In Plain Sight, in 1987 two warrant officers from the Special Air Service (SAS) Regiment were so alarmed by what they saw over the nearby Learmonth Air Force Base that they filed ‘Unusual Aerial Sightings’ reports to the RAAF.26 A statement by an investigating major supporting those reports noted that three radios were used in unsuccessful attempts to raise the approaching RAAF aircraft, and that this was the only time communications were lost over six days of exercises.27 According to In Plain Sight, the object was also observed by the RAAF pilots of the supporting aircraft, who refused to report the incident.28
In the early 1990s, RAAF insiders encouraged Ross Coulthart to reconsider his dismissive attitude towards unidentified objects in the skies.29 Coulthart has said two senior serving RAAF officers spoke to him about UFO or flying saucer sightings they had experienced during their careers,30 and that an anonymous senior RAAF officer told him pilots do not report UFO sightings because doing so is career-ending, though something weird is happening that too many of them have seen to be dismissed.31 The reluctance has older roots: witnesses interviewed by James MacDonald during his 1967 investigative tour of Australia said, when asked whether they had reported their sightings to the USAF or the RAAF, that they typically had not.32