The April-May 1968 issue of the Australian UFO Bulletin is four pages long and carries two stories that, read together, describe the state of civilian UFO research in the late 1960s: one organisation building connections across a continent, another tearing itself apart on the other side of the Pacific.
Paul Norman, VUFORS Public Relations Officer, had toured Queensland, New South Wales, and the Australian Capital Territory in January 1968, visiting UFO groups and sighting locations. Near Parkes, home of the CSIRO radio telescope, he found that “several UFO reports have come from the area around the Parkes Radio Telescope” and that sightings “increased to surprising numbers.” He visited the editorial offices of the Forbes Advocate, Parkes Champion, Post and other local newspapers, finding “considerable interest among newspaper because of recent sightings.” One week before his arrival, two “most respected persons in Parkes” had watched an object follow a horizontal path at high speed, stop abruptly in mid-air, and descend to the ground. They were frightened and did not approach.
In Coolangatta, Norman met Stan Seers and Roy Russell of the Queensland Flying Saucer Research Bureau, along with John Maskell, a Senior Detective at the local C.I.B., who had “observed at least two UFOs and has investigated other incidents related to UFO encounters.” The Queensland society had “won a reputation of being a dependable, objective group.” In Canberra, he met the committee of the newly formed Canberra Unidentified Flying Objects Research Society, which was “already demonstrating the characteristics of a well organised, dependable, objective society.”
Norman also met the RAAF officer who had investigated the Reverend Browning encounter in Tasmania. The officer “was impressed by the details of this outstanding report.” The RAAF’s official explanation: Browning and his witnesses “had been fooled by the moon and some clouds.” Norman’s comment was pointed: “The Air Force speak from both corners of the mouth. To their own commands the UFOs are serious business, on the one hand sincere investigators are reporting the facts to Air Force Intelligence, on the other, the official Public Relations Departments are debunking the sightings to distract public attention from them.”
On the opposite page, a reprinted article from the Sydney Telegraph documented the unravelling of the Condon Committee at the University of Colorado. Dr. Edward Uhler Condon, “a brilliant theoretical physicist, well known for his courage and candour,” had been given $500,000 by the U.S. Air Force to undertake an independent investigation of flying saucers. “Today, the Condon study is making headlines, but for all the wrong reasons.” At least four key people had left the team “without offering a satisfactory reason.” Private documents had leaked. Condon himself had “succumbed to a recurrent heart ailment and took to his bed.”
The article centred on Dr. James McDonald, senior physicist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona, “widely respected in his field.” In a “wary but ominous telephone conversation,” McDonald told the reporter he was “most distressed.” The Condon report, expected later that year, was anticipated to “dismiss any romantic idea that UFOs are interplanetary vehicles.” McDonald “leans strongly to the opinion that they are extra-terrestrial in origin and guided by intelligent hands and as such represent an overwhelmingly important scientific problem.”
A Wellington, New South Wales sighting completed the issue’s documentary content. Six people, including an ambulance officer, an insurance representative, a Soil Conservation employee, and a printer, watched an egg-shaped object through field glasses and a telescope for over an hour on a Saturday night. It moved “continually in a circle and upwards and downwards and emitting sparks of varied colours.”
The issue’s remaining space went to organisational matters. VUFORS meetings had moved to Jerram Hall, corner of Spring Street and Flinders Lane, seating over a hundred. The Support Sub-Committee had arranged a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Plaza Theatre on 24 May, noting that Arthur C. Clarke was “well known to UFO researchers as an outstanding authority on space travel places.” The federal UFO organisation CAPIO was holding its annual convention in Canberra over the Queen’s Birthday weekend. Forty-one science teachers had attended a VUFORS lecture at Peninsula School, Mount Eliza, and left “with a determination to report any findings to Box 43, Moorabbin 3189.”
The Australian Flying Saucer Review, the society’s more formal magazine, was in preparation. The Canadian sister societies CAPRO and CAPIC had amalgamated. New library titles had been added. The work of a small organisation connecting itself to a national and international network continued, four pages at a time.
