The lead article in the June-July 1968 issue is a lecture by M. Miller, F.R.A.S., of Mount Stromlo Observatory in the Australian Capital Territory, delivered at the CAPIO Convention in Canberra on the weekend of 8 to 10 June. It is the most methodologically rigorous piece the Australian UFO Bulletin had published since the UFOIC’s Dr. Lindtner series a decade earlier, and its subject is not what UFOs are but how to look at the sky.
“Astronomers are particularly disgusted when people report the planet Venus as an unidentified flying object,” Miller began. “Yet it happens again and again, whenever Venus is near western elongation.” He proceeded to teach. Observers must know the objects already in the sky: planets (Venus the brightest, Jupiter visible along the ecliptic, Mars distinctly reddish, Saturn orange-tinted), meteors and fireballs (the brightest visible in daylight, accompanied by explosive noises from their hypersonic shock waves), and satellites (literally thousands in orbit, distinguishable from aircraft by their silence, steady path, and inability to change direction). Each type of familiar object has characteristic features. Each can be mistaken for something else by a witness who does not know them.
For genuinely unusual objects, Miller offered three measurable quantities: position, direction of motion, and brightness. He was blunt about what cannot be measured. “Do not try to estimate miles per hour, except for aircraft types with which you are familiar. IT CANNOT BE DONE.” Speed estimates based on visual observation are meaningless without knowing size and distance, neither of which can be determined from appearance alone. What observers can measure is angular motion: the number of degrees an object traverses per unit of time. An illustration showed how to use an outstretched hand to estimate angular distances. “Be a good observer if you believe your observations are worthwhile,” Miller concluded. “Better observations will lead to more identifications.”
The lecture set a standard the issue’s ten sighting reports tried to meet. Each is filed with date, time, and a brief description. On 9 March 1968 at 5:30 p.m., a disc-shaped object with a bump in its centre, about twenty feet across, was seen travelling silently over Woodfield, Victoria. On 11 March at 1:30 a.m., a saucer-shaped object moved very slowly over Mordialloc, Victoria, then “turned and disappeared at a tremendous speed leaving a grey trail” while a bright yellow-orange light from its dome lit up its grey base. On 12 January at 10:50 a.m., a black disc-shaped object with a raised centre portion was seen over Hallam, Victoria, estimated at 4,000 miles per hour travelling south to north. From early March 1966 (reported belatedly), a red elliptical object was observed very close to the ground with a humming noise that increased in intensity before the object “took off at tremendous speed.”
The most substantial case report came from Canada. On 20 May 1967, Stefan Michalak of Winnipeg was prospecting near Falcon Lake, seventy-five miles east of the city, when he looked up to see two red glowing elliptical objects flying towards him. One landed about ten feet off the ground; the other departed the way it had come. As the glow faded, the landed object resembled “two stainless steel saucers placed together, although the top half had a large central dome.” Michalak watched for about thirty minutes, feeling the heat radiating from its side, hearing a constant whistling noise. Then a door slid open in the lower half. “From the opening came a violet light so brilliant that Michalak was obliged to put on his welding glasses.” Inside he could see blinking red, white, and blue lights.
He approached. His rubber glove melted when he tried to touch the surface. He heard voices and tried responding in Russian, Polish, German, and Italian. There was no answer. The door closed. The machine began a counter-clockwise rotation and took off, “giving out such a powerful blast of heat that Michalak’s clothing was burnt and a grassfire started.” He drove back to Falcon Lake stunned, burned, and feeling sick. He was found to have second and third degree burns on his face and chest, the chest burns showing “a strange checked pattern.” He could not keep food down, lost twenty-two pounds in a week, and complained of “a strange odour from inside him.” A radiation test proved negative but his blood count was “significantly below normal.” His symptoms, the report concluded, “suggested that he was suffering from radiation burns.”
The Falcon Lake case would become one of the most thoroughly investigated physical-trace encounters in the civilian record. The AUFOB documented it here from the Canadian source (CAPRO, Winnipeg) barely a year after the event.
A shorter item noted that the Scoriton case in England, in which Arthur Bryant claimed to have met three Venusians on Dartmoor, “is now considered to have been false.” Bryant had died on 24 June 1967 from a longstanding brain tumour. His doctors and his widow considered his story hallucinatory. The co-compiler of the book about the case, Mr. Norman Oliver, and Mrs. Bryant had “made known certain facts which make Bryant’s story appear false.” The bulletin reported the debunking without editorialising: one case closed, the Falcon Lake case still open.
The annual meeting was announced for September. The committee urgently needed members with secretarial or book-keeping experience. A Mr. Wood of Altona offered nine telescopes for members interested in astronomy. The librarian was Mrs. Kathy Valente. The work of a volunteer organisation staffing itself, training its observers, and documenting what they found continued through six typewritten pages from Moorabbin.
