Oliver Harry Turner was an Australian nuclear physicist and Defence Department scientist who, across two decades, produced some of the most detailed classified assessments of unidentified aerial phenomena undertaken within the Australian intelligence establishment. He is known to researchers largely through the work of Bill Chalker, who visited him at his home in the summer of 20011. Turner had earlier served as chief health physics officer for the Maralinga nuclear tests2, the British atomic bomb trials conducted during the 1950s and early 1960s2.
In 1954, while a Melbourne University nuclear physics professor holding an existing security clearance, Turner approached the Royal Australian Air Force asking to read its UFO files and was hired by the Directorate of Air Force Intelligence Australia to conduct a classified review of recent sightings3, an episode now catalogued as the 1954 Harry Turner Directorate of Air Force Intelligence (DAFI) Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) review. His resulting report concluded that the evidence presented by the air force tended to support the view that certain strange aircraft had been observed behaving in a manner suggestive of extra-terrestrial origin4, and he was rebuffed for these findings by the air force’s intelligence branch5. Because Turner had quoted the American flying-saucer author Donald Keyhoe in his research, Australia’s Director of Air Force Intelligence dismissed his findings after consulting with the United States Air Force (USAF)6, on the stated grounds that Turner had erred in citing Keyhoe, whose books supposedly gave a misleading impression of official US government sanction7. The Royal Australian Air Force ultimately elected to heed its American ally and play down Turner’s extra-terrestrial hypothesis8. Now-declassified files show that the same Turner subsequently took part in the British nuclear tests at Maralinga South Australia from 1956 to 1963 as a health physics officer9, during which he investigated strange sightings of anomalous objects over the site10. His interest in the subject had also been sharpened by the mysterious sightings at Maralinga in 196011: in one instance, a light seen in July 1960 at Wewak Maralinga, Turner concluded it was not a natural phenomenon but a UFO, either a satellite re-entry cone or a flying saucer12, while the Range’s security officer instead speculated it was a meteor or static electricity13.
By the early 1970s Turner was a scientific analyst, and later head of the nuclear science section, within the Australia, Joint Intelligence Bureau, Directorate of Scientific and Technical Intelligence (DSTI)14, 15. By 1971 he was firmly convinced the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) phenomenon was real and required urgent investigation16, and privately pushed the case at the highest levels of Australia’s Defence Department while sightings were being played down in the media and by the air force17. This culminated in his declassified 1971 Harry Turner report ‘Scientific and Intelligence Aspects of the Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) Problem’, which, according to the report, asserted that unidentified objects were real18 and that there was an ongoing deliberate official US policy to ridicule UFO sightings in order to stifle public awareness of the phenomenon19. Turner considered that this facade of ridicule was intended to allay public alarm, deny the Soviet Union a propaganda opening, and conceal a genuine US programme developing vehicles that emulated UFO performance20. He asserted that in 1953 the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) had persuaded the USAF to use the Project Blue Book investigation as a means of publicly debunking UFOs21, while secretly launching a crash programme into Anti-Gravity Propulsion22. His paper also criticised the Condon Report, the US Air Force-funded 1968 study directed by physicist Edward Condon23, arguing that its conclusions conflicted with its own contents and had been discredited by many reputable scientists24, and he dismissed the official Project Blue Book investigation after its closure by the USAF in 196925. Turner said that many intelligence officers associated with the UFO problem, including former CIA director Roscoe Hillenkoetter, had stated that the US government knew UFOs were extra-terrestrial but was withholding this fact from the public26. He met the Project Blue Book scientist J. Allen Hynek during Hynek’s visit to Australia27, and told his superiors that Hynek, along with many other reputable scientists, did not accept the USAF’s standard explanations of misidentification, hysteria or hoax28.
Turner obtained access to the Australian Air Force’s UAP sightings reports29 and proposed an Australian “rapid intervention team” to investigate UFO events, for which an aircraft was to be kept on standby30, a plan that had the approval of Australia’s Chief Defence Scientist31. His concern was taken very seriously, possibly because sightings of strange objects at Woomera Rocket Range South Australia were still occurring32. However, there was bad blood between Turner and the Directorate of Air Force Intelligence Australia because he had criticised its past handling of UAP sightings reports33, and the air force subsequently withdrew his access to its sightings files34, spiking his rapid intervention team proposal17. Bill Chalker later assessed that Turner had in fact been arguing for the air force to be given more resources to investigate UFOs scientifically, but that the Directorate took it as criticism and shut him out35. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Turner fought what is described as a secret battle to encourage a more scientific examination of the UFO mystery within the intelligence and military establishment36.
Chalker, who befriended Turner late in his life37, considers that political myopia from both the US and Australian military effectively ended Australia’s first serious attempt at scientific investigation of UFOs38. During his 2001 visit, Turner gave Chalker Harry Turner’s ten pages of handwritten notes on Mrs. Klein, covering his 1971-1972 investigation of a Canberra woman he called Mrs. Klein, later identified as Vicki Klein39 — an episode Anomalica records as the 1971-72 Vicki Klein alien contact and abduction investigation. The mid-1971 rash of Canberra-area UFO sightings had prompted Turner to contact the local Canberra civilian UFO society (formed 1967)40, after which Klein made private contact with him, and during a series of meetings at her home between July 1971 and February 1972 described her unfolding alien contact experience41. Turner told Chalker that while Klein informed the Canberra group of her sightings, she was careful not to mention the alien dynamic unfolding in her own house42. Turner’s notes did not record the date of Klein’s fourth UFO sighting43, so he corresponded with fellow scientist Dr. Michael Duggin, who shared his deep interest in the UFO phenomenon, to supplement the details44; Chalker described the two men as part of a secret “invisible college” of scientists researching the mystery45. Turner said he was not sure what to make of Klein’s information at the time and was simply trying to make an accurate record of her claims46. Those claims included Klein’s account that the signal for “the beginning of the end” would be the disappearance of a small island followed by a larger one, which she suspected would be in the New Guinea area, with the ensuing chaos lasting three days and worsening before the world was cleansed47. According to Chalker, Ron Summers separately confirmed to him the basic story Klein had told Turner48, and Chalker found what followed in Turner’s notes striking for how closely it resembled the alien-abduction accounts that would come to dominate UFO controversy fifteen years later49, prefiguring elements that would not become public until Budd Hopkins described them in his 1987 book Intruders50. This encounter with Chalker is separately recorded as Bill Chalker’s 2001-07 visit to Oliver Harry Turner.