The Westall UFO Incident, Australia’s Most Baffling Extraterrestrial Mystery
World History Archive/Alamy Stock PhotoA photograph of the supposed Westall UFO encounter, 1966.
On April 6, 1966, more than 300 children and staff at Westall High School in Melbourne, Australia, witnessed a round, silver object about the size of a car hovering near the school.
Per a report from news.com.au, physicist James E. McDonald later interviewed Andrew Greenwood, a science teacher from the school, about the incident. Greenwood explained that five planes surrounded the object as onlookers watched from below.
“He called it the most amazing flying he had ever seen in his life,” McDonald recounted. “The planes were doing everything possible to approach the object and he said how they all avoided collision he will never know.”
As the aircraft tried to approach it, the UFO would accelerate at different rates — sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly — before coming to a complete stop, only to continue its erratic acceleration.
The cat-and-mouse game lasted nearly 20 minutes while around 350 students and staff watched. Then, the UFO suddenly flew off, and the school’s headmaster told everyone to return to class.
McDonald said the headmaster then informed the children they would be “severely punished” if they discussed what they saw. He also threatened the staff, saying they would “lose their jobs if they mentioned it at all.”
Later, several witnesses claimed that men in black suits visited them and warned them against speaking about the incident.
Despite this, Greenwood said he tried to talk to other staff about what they’d seen, but they refused to say anything. One student eventually spoke with Greenwood about it — but a half hour later, when he broached the subject again, she wouldn’t say a word.
The Maury Island UFO Incident — And Encounters With The Men In Black
Public DomainAn illustration of the Maury Island UFO incident.
On June 27, 1947, Harold Dahl and his son Charles were on a boat near the eastern shore of Maury Island, Washington, in Puget Sound. Suddenly, six donut-shaped objects appeared in the sky above them and dropped a barrage of metallic debris.
Dahl had his camera with him and managed to snap a few photographs of the strange flying craft, but as soon as they appeared, they were gone. When Dahl and his son returned to shore, he showed the photographs to his supervisor, Fred Crisman. Skeptical, Crisman investigated the scene for himself and allegedly also saw one of the flying objects hovering above.
Before he could share the story or photographs, however, Dahl received an unexpected visitor. The next morning, he said a man in a black suit came to him. The man described Dahl’s own experience to him in scarily accurate detail, warning him that if he spoke about what happened, he would suffer the consequences.
Dahl and Crisman would later come out and say that their experience was a hoax, but it was the first time anyone had actually mentioned the eponymous figures known as the “Men in Black,” members of a shadowy, quasi-governmental organization who appear in a number of real sightings of UFOs.
The Men in Black showed up again in the story of Albert K. Bender, a UFO fanatic who published the short-lived magazine Space Review, which covered all manner of strange aerial phenomena.
In one 1953 edition of Space Review, Bender also claimed to have been visited by “three men wearing dark suits” who allegedly demanded that he stop publishing information about UFOs. That same year, Bender shut down his magazine entirely.
He later shared his story with author Gray Barker, who published a collection of stories about the Men in Black in his 1956 book They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. Since then, alleged encounters with the Men in Black have been a staple of real UFO sightings.
