The February 1968 issue of the Australian UFO Bulletin carries a new masthead. Where the Sydney UFOIC’s emblem once sat, the words “Publication of The Victorian U.F.O. Research Society” now appear, above the address P.O. Box 43, Moorabbin, 3189, Australia. The publication has moved from Sydney to Melbourne. The format has changed: six typewritten pages rather than the UFOIC’s illustrated booklets. The word “Newsheet” replaces “Bulletin” in the header. The meetings are at Kelvin Hall, 55 Exhibition Street, on the first Friday of every month. The Sightings Investigations Officer is Neville Thornbill.
The transition is unremarked upon in the text. The issue opens directly with its lead story, and it is a large one: the Soviet Union has established a permanent scientific commission to investigate UFO sightings. The announcement came on 12 November 1967, and the bulletin calls it “the most important single event to have occurred in the UFO world during 1967.”
The details arrived from multiple sources. A Moscow contact, writing on 25 October, reported the commission established on 18 October under General Stolyerov, with Dr. Fyodor Yu. Zigel (whose earlier article in the magazine Smena had prepared the ground) as his deputy. The committee included an unnamed Russian cosmonaut, eighteen scientists and astronomers, and two hundred qualified observers distributed across the country. The commission was particularly interested in reports from the Caucasus, the Urals, and Central Asia. The English Flying Saucer Review noted the British press had given the story significant coverage: The Times devoted an editorial to it, its leader-writer concluding that “UFOs… must have some explanation, else the Russians would never have set up a commission to examine them.”
The bulletin positioned the Soviet project as competition for the American Colorado Project, which had a twelve-month head start and was expected to report in September 1968. “Quite apart from anything else, the Russian investigations should provide healthy competition.”
Soviet astronomers had also been observing UFOs directly. Through telescopes, they tracked crescent-shaped objects over Kazan, estimated at 500 to 600 yards in diameter, travelling at 10,000 miles per hour at heights between thirty and sixty-five miles.
The second major feature concerned 716 stone discs received by Moscow scientists from China. Found in caves in the Bayan-Kara-Ula mountains on the China-Tibet border, covered in unreadable hieroglyphics and dating back several thousand years, each disc had a hole in the centre and a double groove spiralling to the outer rim, “looked like a phonograph record.” After twenty years of study, a Chinese expert published a paper titled “Groove Writing Relating to Spaceships Which, As Recorded On The Discs, Existed 12,000 Years Ago.” Moscow scientists who scraped rock particles from the discs reported they “gave off a vibration with an unusual rhythm, as if they carried an electric charge or were part of an electrical circuit.” The hypothesis: the discs were calling cards left by interplanetary travellers whose descendants were a frail tribe of people, four feet two inches tall, living in the mountain caves and defying ethnic classification.
From Western Australia, Les Locke of the Perth UFO Society forwarded two sighting reports. A farmer named Pocle, inspecting his paddocks near Yaricorn on 16 November at 6:30 p.m., heard a whining noise like an electric motor at high speed. A saucer-shaped object, approximately twenty feet in diameter and five to six feet high, smoky grey in colour, landed four to five feet from him. “He spoke the UFO and his voice came back at him as if someone was talking to him.” When he got out of his car, the object “took off like a rocket and disappeared in a split second.” In a second report from 30 October, a Mr. Woodclip driving ten miles from Boy-up Brook at sixty to sixty-five miles per hour found his car suddenly stopped, electrical system dead. A tube of bluish light approximately two feet in diameter projected down from an object shaped like a football. The beam came through his windscreen. He sat for three to five minutes, “feeling that someone was observing him,” before the beam turned off and the object departed over the horizon instantaneously.
The issue also carried a profile of Paul Santorini, a Greek physicist and engineer who had helped develop radar, fuses for the atom bomb, and the napalm bomb. Santorini held a six-inch entry in Who’s Who, was a fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences, and had been educated at Zurich under a physics professor named Albert Einstein, with whom he maintained a thirty-year correspondence of eighty letters. Having come out of retirement to lecture the Greek Astronautical Society, Santorini declared: “Flying saucers are no longer the joke they were.” He attributed the 1965 New York blackout and similar power failures to saucer activity, and identified three reasons for official secrecy: the military could not admit an alien force it could not defend against; civil authorities feared panic; and the churches opposed acknowledgement because of its implications for the doctrine of creation.
Professor Clyde E. Ingalls of Cornell University reported that electromagnetic waves could be “heard” through direct stimulation of the nervous system, bypassing the ear entirely. Dr. Fred M. Johnson of the University of California at Berkeley announced that stellar dust was mostly chlorophyll, suggesting “biological life may be possible in outer space.” And Sir John Eccles, the Nobel prize-winning brain physiologist, offered the counterpoint: “Earth is the only place where intelligent life exists. This put our planet on top of everything in the universe.”
A BBC film crew had been scheduled to visit Melbourne to interview UFO witnesses for an eighty-minute programme, but sterling devaluation forced cancellation. The committee was investigating a lapel badge. Membership renewals were overdue.
This is the first issue of the publication’s Melbourne era, and the format it would maintain for decades: a typewritten newsheet mixing reprinted press articles with sighting reports, organisational notices, and international correspondence. The Bridgeport post office box has become a Moorabbin post office box. The editor’s name does not appear. The subscription price is not stated. The work continues.
