James MacDonald was an American physicist1 who held the title of professor at the University of Arizona.2 He officially worked for the United States Navy while, in his spare time, investigating Australian UFO reports and comparing them with American ones.3 His aim was to determine whether UFO reports from different countries tallied and whether the phenomenon was global in scale.4
During the James E. McDonald 1967 Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania UFO investigation tour, McDonald interviewed witnesses in Australia face-to-face and by telephone to establish for himself what had happened in individual cases and how credible the witnesses were.5 He had already spent about 12 to 13 months in the United States interviewing witnesses in key cases before the tour,6 went on to investigate roughly 50 to 60 cases in New Zealand and Australia,7 recorded approximately 3,000 metres of interview tape,8 and interviewed about 70 Australians or New Zealanders.9 He was also sent to interview Barry Greenwood about the 1966 Westall High School sighting, as part of a presidentially authorised inquiry.10 In Melbourne, he spoke with Brian King about UFO investigations11 and appeared on Barry Jones’s local talkback radio programme, which took listener calls during his appearance.12 He later travelled to Tasmania Hobart, where he found what he described as extremely interesting cases.13
He concluded that the pattern of sightings in Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania was not appreciably different from that in the United States.14 Many people, he noted, reported lights that moved across the sky, hovered and manoeuvred in ways that did not match meteors,15 and there were many cases in which animals such as dogs, horses and cows were present and reacted.16 McDonald said he found that witnesses of high credibility reported unconventional objects including discs and cigar-shaped objects,17 frequently at very low elevation,18 hovering over urban areas19 or following cars.20 He also said he found a little evidence suggesting there might be somewhat more sightings per head of population in Australia than in the United States, though he would not stand firmly on that impression.21
Among the cases he examined was the 1963-02 Moe farm disc sighting reported by farmer Brew. McDonald travelled to Moe, in the Gippsland area of Victoria, to interview the farmer, Brew, in person,22 and revisited the site a few days before his Melbourne radio appearance.23 He recounted that Brew had been milking at 07:00 one morning in February 1963 when a large disc-like object emerged from the overcast and hovered over a tree about 90 metres away,24 and that Brew was most struck by the animals’ reaction: the cattle stampeded, the dogs barked and the horses broke loose.25 McDonald said this panic reaction was not at all unrepresentative of animal behaviour in such cases.26 He also checked the 1955-11-17 New Zealand West Coast train spinning objects sighting against a close-dated sighting by an airline pilot while in Auckland;27 according to the same record, the objects in that case appeared semi-circular with no clearly discernible shape, seeming to spin at terrific speed,28 and were not terribly far away, being seen quite clearly.29 He examined the 1965-03-08 East Preston iridescent blue object sighting as well; the same record states that the object moved fairly rapidly, disappearing shortly after the witness focused binoculars on it,30 through which it appeared metallic and iridescent blue.31 McDonald considered the case moderately interesting and worth discussing further with the witness.32 At the site of the circa 1957 Wairakei flying saucer sighting by surveying engineer, the record notes that the geothermal field’s steam bores put out a roar loud enough that people had almost to shout to be heard, so no sound from the object could have been audible,33 and that the sighting was never reported to any air force.34 Of the 1949 Hawthorn cigar-shaped object sighting, McDonald said the clear, non-thundery conditions ruled out plasmoids of the ball lightning type,35 and that the object’s stationary character ruled out a meteoric fireball.36 Of an East Melbourne cylindrical object case, he said that it having been reported by no more than two people was not the same as it having been seen by no more than two people.37 He also said that experienced private investigating groups worked in Sydney, Melbourne and Tasmania, as distinct from official groups, whose explanations he found outrageously absurd.38
McDonald engaged directly with proposed explanations for the phenomenon. He said the main difficulty with Carl Gustav Jung’s psychological archetype explanation of flying saucers was that Jung had not been addressing the real UFO problem but psychotic types with a psychic need to believe,39 and that the theory required assuming canine, equine, feline and bovine archetypal images were identical to human ones, without explaining why the phenomenon stampeded cattle.40 Having, in the year before the tour, worked through psychological, advanced-technology, hoax, fabrication, fraud and poorly-understood-geophysical-phenomena hypotheses,41 he said he had concluded that the extraterrestrial hypothesis for UFOs was what remained after eliminating the others,42 and that the objects reported amounted to machine-like craft of some kind.43
McDonald was strongly critical of the official American response and took the issue to international bodies. The official position of the United States Air Force (USAF), he said, was that the UFO subject was a lot of nonsense and a burdensome duty the Air Force was unable to get away from,44 and that although expertise existed to examine the problem, it had not been used for 15 years.45 Project Blue Book, the USAF’s UFO investigation, had by 1967 been running for about 14 years46 and consisted of three people: a major, a sergeant and a secretary.47 McDonald said the Air Force issued press releases about the thoroughness of its work and indicated that only two to three per cent of cases were unknowns, which it maintained would probably be explained with more data,48 but he concluded that the investigation had in fact been superficial, conducted by persons of extremely low scientific competence, and must be regarded as essentially not a scientific investigation at all.49 On 1967-06-07, he addressed the United Nations Outer Space Affairs Group, submitting a formal statement urging UN action on the problem.50 An appointment to see UN Secretary-General U Thant around the same time was prevented by the 1967 Middle East crisis (Six-Day War),51 and McDonald said he intended to try again.52 He said U Thant, in an exchange with Drew Pearson shortly before McDonald’s Melbourne appearance, had described the UFO problem as probably the most important international problem, with the present exception of the Vietnam War;53 McDonald said he cabled U Thant a reply endorsing the statement, while disagreeing to the extent that, in his own view, the UFO problem was of even greater international importance than the Vietnamese situation.54